Full transcript of “You'll want to know this ONE versatile SURVIVAL SKILL! Pine Resin USES”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 All right, folks. So, Hazel and I are out in the pinewoods today. We're out here hunting pine sap, or more accurately, pine resin. So, resin is the sticky stuff that a pine or other conifers exude to seal wounds and help protect themselves from insect and disease. It also happens to be one of the most useful items that you're going to find in the woods. It can be used for everything from making glue to antiseptic savves. Uh you can use it for caulking uh cracks in wooden boats. It's got a bunch of different uses. We're going to talk about all those things. And we're going to walk around here, see if we can collect some, and then I'm going to show you how to process it into
0:45 a couple of different items that I think you'll find very useful. All conifers are going to produce some amount of pitch, but some trees like these ponderros pines produce way more than other trees like cedars. But if cedar and juniper is all you have access to, you can still find pitch. You just got to look around a little bit more. Spend a little bit more time collecting. In a pine forest like this, pitch isn't all that hard to find. You're just looking for trees that have some sort of wound in it. When these trees are injured, whether that be a branch getting ripped off or, you know, being hit by a piece of logging equipment or maybe a deer uh rubbed the tree with its antlers, all of these things create wounds and cause that pine tree to exude that that resin. You'll
1:32 sometimes find resin that's really runny and fresh and it's super sticky and very soft all the way to the other end of the spectrum, which is these really hard nodules. Now, all of this stuff can be used. You just kind of process it a little bit differently. So, this tree right here is just loaded with pine sap. Get out of the way, girl. We'll just collect a big bunch of this. This will be all we need.
2:25 All right. So, we've got a lot of resin in the basket here, and this is a really good producing tree, and it'll just keep on pumping this stuff out. Uh, and so if you do um if you do end up needing more, you just remember where your good producing trees are and come back to them. Now, what we're going to do is load up our resin in this. We're going to set it on top of this. And then we're going to set this in the middle of a relatively cool fire. You don't want to get it too hot because this pine resin will ignite. It's very flammable. And if you get it too hot, you're just going to have a big flaming mass of of pine tar in here. And it's very hard to put out once it gets caught on fire. You're not going to blow
3:11 it out. You got to smother it with something. Now, these are relatively large holes because that is the diameter of the smallest masonry bit that I had. Um, you can make, if you have the uh the capabilities to make your own primitive pottery like this, you could just uh make a pot with raw clay, drill your holes, and then fire it. I didn't have the foresight to do that, so I had to drill these holes afterwards. Um, so this is the holes we're dealing with. We are going to get a little bit of debris that that's going to go through these holes and that's going to be fine for the uh what I'm going to be using this uh this sap for or this
3:59 resin. So, this is just one of the things that you can do with pine resin. This is a fire starter that I made with what's going to be left over after we filter out our pine resin for the other uses. So, when you get done filtering out your pine sap, you're going to be left with a bunch of this junk right here. And to make a fire starter, all you got to do is combine this with some sort of dry fibrous material. And so, wood shavings like this work great. Dry grass works great. And you just take this stuff, push it in, put it in there, and just kind of mix it up. get all that wood shavings or whatever you're using just kind of saturated in that resin that's left over. And that's going to make a really good fire starter.
5:18 So, I'm just going to build up a little bit of a fire here and get some coals so that we can put my pottery sieve down in there. So, while that fire is burning down, I'm just going to take some of the sap that we collect or the pitch resin, just put it in our bowl here. [Applause]
6:12 So, we've got a pretty good bit in there, but just heat it up a little more. Got that pine straw in there. Let it keep rendering. [Applause] Not what I wanted to happen.
7:07 So that's what happens when you get it too hot. You cannot blow it out. Just a few little floaties in there. We'll try to get out. All right. So, got a good bit of pitch filtered out or rendered out. I'm just going to let this sit and then I'm going to divide it and I'll make glue out of some of it and I'll make a
7:52 salve/ wood sealer leather leather preservative out of the other half. So, our pine pitch is cooled overnight and you can see that it's just very glassy. Now, this was pitch that was pretty soft when we first collected it. And so, even when it's cool, you can still dent it. And it's it's still relatively pliable. If you just use the hard nodules, when it when it cools like this, it's going to be very, very hard and very brittle. And in order to use that, you're going to have to add some sort of oils back into it. And most commonly that's either some sort of animal fat or beeswax is also commonly used. So what I've got here is some
8:38 tallow or rendered animal fat. And I think this actually came from an elk. And to render this out, all you got to do is take the fat, cut it up into cubes, and then just heat it slowly. And that fat will melt out of the the membrane that contains the fat. Then all you got to do is strain that out, let it cool, and you've got tallow. Now, all the things or most of the things that you're going to be making with pine resin result from combining them with some ratio of fat. Some of it has just a little bit of fat in the case of glue and some of it has a lot of fat in the case of salves or wood sealers or leather leather preservatives. So, there's a few different schools of thought on how to make pitch glue with
9:24 this pine pitch. Some people advocate for only using the softer resin and then adding things like charcoal and rabbit droppings. And then other people advocate for using only the hard nodules and adding animal fats into it to kind of soften it up a little bit and increase the pliability or the toughness of the glue. Now, I have done some very limited and I would say unscientific testing of some of these different things. Now, I say unscientific because it really is completely unscientific. I have a sample size of one for each of these formulations. And when you do that, you really can't say a whole lot about what's going on because with a sample size of one, there could be some
10:10 fluke that's going on. But by far the best or the strongest glue that I made was simply taking those hard nodules, melting them down, adding just enough fat so that when it cooled, you could just dent it with your fingernail, and then adding a little bit of cattail fluff as a binder or a strengthener for that glue. For that formulation, it took over 110 lbs of pressure to shear these two boards apart. I had three other formulations and two of them had added charcoal and the closest one that I got to that 110 lbs was only 50 lbs, less than half of what it took to shear that original formulation that I told you about. Now, as I said, I didn't have any replicates
10:55 and so this could have been a fluke. I'm going to do more testing on this in the future and see if I can't whittle down what is the actual strongest pitch glue that you can make in a more controlled and scientific manner. And along those lines, if you know of any experiments where they have done some replicates and actually did things in a little bit more controlled manner and found some results on the strongest pitch glue that you can make, um, leave me a link in the comments. I'd love to take a look at that. In this bowl here, I've got probably 75% rendered um, animal fat, and this came from an elk. and 25%
11:40 um pine pitch. There's actually a little bit of birch tar in this as well, but I use this for a number of things. You can use it as a leather preservative. Um it works great for um a primitive wood sealer. I put this on some of the primitive bows and arrows that I make. Um and it also works really good as a an antiseptic salve. So if you've got a cut or something like that, this is like nature's neosporin. you just rub it in there and it really does help with the the speeding the healing of that. So, this stuff is relatively cool. It's probably 75 degrees out here and this has been sitting in the shade, but you can see it's um very, you know, soft. You can get this with your finger and it is a little bit sticky, but it's um it's
12:26 probably about like Neosporin or something like that. It's it's not sticky like the sap. You could you could wipe this off of your hands easily. And that's due to the fat that you add to it. So, this stuff works really good as a primitive uh kind of leather conditioner and waterproofer. Can rub it on there and if you heat the leather up just a little bit, it really helps it to to penetrate in there, but it'll definitely help with the water resistance of any kind of leather that you're going to be working with. If you do use any kind of like leather
13:11 preservative/water sealer, there's a good chance that it's formulated very very similar to to what you have here. So, you can see the difference there. This shoe I treated I just rubbed this stuff on yesterday and it's already soaked into the leather. And this is this will take just a little while and it'll soak in. and it'll look a lot like this one. So, these are just a few of the primary uses for pine resin. You've got the medicine, you've got uh leather preservative sealer, you've got the wood sealers, um and of course pitch glue. It also would have been used, and you can still use it for things like torches. Um I believe a formulation similar to what I've shown here with the the resin and
13:57 the fat was also used to seal up the seams in birch bark canoes. Um, and in fact, it's been used for boat building for centuries to seal the seams between uh the planks on wooden boats. So, um, it's not that hard to do. There's pine trees all over the place. So, get out there, go find some pine resin, make some salve, make some leather conditioner, wood preservative, and uh maybe some hair gel. I don't know. If you try that, let me know in the comments. I wonder how that turns out. So, uh, yeah, get out there, get your hands dirty, and we'll see you on the next one.
