Battle of Backbone Mountain

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Whoa goddamn, looks like someone in the fatwood industry wrote this! This needs to be cleaned up so we don't get sentences like "Fatwood is one of the only fire starters that is all natural."

Defiantly, but this article doesn’t answer my question. I want to know why it is that 1 in 1000 pine trees that die, the core of the trunk will turn into fatwood (or Lighterknot as I have known it)? This wood is so resinous that it can lie on the ground for decades without rotting, and will burn like solidified gasoline. (PM) --Turnbull FL (talk) 13:14, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I revised the Fatwood article. It needs citations and could use additions (including a picture), but at least all the advertising spiel has been removed. FBM (talk) 18:36, 4 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I made some improvements but have a long way to go. Incorporating some world importance and distribution, as well as inline cites and one reference (so far), I removed the tags. I have some more to contribute but wanted to make a start. There is a world of information concerning the use of fatwood for tar, turpentine, and wood charcoal from the 1700's to the early 1900's. A type of light tar and then a tar/varnish mixture (with other things) was used as a wood preservative to include maritime uses. Getting into the properties will also be interesting and maybe name uses as we call it "pineknot" and I can probably get a picture at a point. I will provide many references and sources, as well as several sections. Otr500 (talk) 15:08, 30 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I expanded the article that was inclusive of answering basic questions in previous comments so should be educational, not overly technical, and interesting. There is a lot more to include; commercial and non-commercial current and historical uses, and more general expansion to include foot note references. There is even a pine tree in California (Jeffrey Pine) that looks similar to the long-leaf, but the resin contains natural n-heptane. This is not just combustible but has explosive properties and so is very dangerous and even caused injuries and deaths during early attempted refinement. I have not found information concerning information and properties of the Jeffery Pine, in a fatwood state, but this would be interesting information. Otr500 (talk) 04:24, 1 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the sentence, "The state in which fatwood is found is that of the resin hardening over time and ranges from a form of colloquially named Copal after the tree of the same name, to Amber (another tree), and are states leading from sub-fossil or semi-fossilized resin to a process that can result in petrification." from the article. Amber is fossilized resin, not from one species. It is ancient often tens of millions of years old. Copal is the name of the intermediate state between resin and amber. Copal is harder, and less sticky than resin, but has not yet turned into amber. There is noting in fatwood at all like them, as it takes eons for the chemical reactions in the sap to convert resin into copal then into amber. Nick Beeson (talk) 12:18, 24 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]