White Pine Bow Drill Set: Overcoming Unexpected Challenges

Several years ago when I was first learning to bow drill, several well-meaning friends told me that pine would be no good for fire by friction. The idea was that it was just too resinous to work. The pine sap would gum up the works and keep an ember from forming and igniting. I don’t believe that’s the case, though – at least not for natually dead pine limbs like I pick up in the woods. Pines and other conifers are naturally self-pruning. As a tree grows, the lower limbs that live in the shade will naturally die back and eventually break off due to wind, snow or ice. As a pine limb dies naturally, its sap flows back toward the trunk of the tree and often forms a pine knot that’s full of “fatwood.” I’ve made some videos about the joys of fatwood and there are plenty more across YouTube. Fatwood is just hardened pine sap that contains a lot of terpene – a flammable light hydrocarbon. Terpenes are actually a class of chemicals. Pinene is the terpene specific to pine trees and is what gives pines their distinct aroma. Pine limbs that you can pick up off the forest floor are pretty much devoid of resin and sap. My pine fireboard and spindle have no distinct pine aroma at all. I don’t believe the challenges I faced with this project had anything at all to do with residual pine resin. White pine is one of the softest woods around. The limb I cut my kit from I picked up from the ground on a camping trip a few months ago. It was long dead, well-seasoned, only lightly degraded and not at all rotten. I’ve used pine fireboards with wildflower spindles with great success for the past couple of years. It occurred to me, though, that I had never made a full pine bow drill kit. I decided to give it a try and thought it would be a trivial project to pursue. Boy, was I wrong! It took me two spindles and about 10 tries before was able to reliably make an ember with my pine kit. In the end I believe it was actually the softness of the wood which lead to the challenges I faced. It seems like the spindle and fireboard would just wear away too quickly to allow proper charring of dust. I got lots of brown, dirt colored, dust piles that would smoke but fail to ignite. If I tried to heat things up by leaning harder I’d tend to bore right through the fireboard. In the end, success came when I backed off on the spindle pressure and increased my bow speed. I lean on the spindle just enough to fully engage the spindle in the divot. When it begins to smoke a lot, I then bow as fast as I can (typically counting up to 50 strokes) to create as much heat as possible without boring through the fireboard. That resulted in sufficient quantities of well charred dust to ignite and stay lit. So, success in the end, but it took some effort and troubleshooting. Persistence is your friend! As a final note, I’ve not tried to use pine limbs that were pruned while still alive. After seasoning they may indeed retain residual resin or sap that will inhibit ember formation and ignition. I just don’t know. That may be a project for another day. Ahi! Sua! Qul!