Pine tar from scratch - How to make it using simple tools

This is a rather unusual way of making tar these days. It is also a way of making tar of a higher quality than you’d buy in the store. This is brown tar, or should I say reddish brown, with a higher resilience to water, ampler then black tar and on woodwork far more beautiful if you’d ask me. It is made from pine root in a tjärdal (tar ditch kiln) as tar has been made in Sweden for at least a thousand years. The old ditches can be found every here and there in the forests of Småland but I made my own one, about a fourth the size of what I believe is a normal size.

Making the kiln was a previous video where I also showed the splitting of pine stumps, the making of troughs/containers and how to dig without having a spade, check it out at:    • Making a tar kiln the old fashioned way  

This is one of the final episodes in a series where I explore craft processes without having a single hand tool to begin with and then make tools to make tools. Eventually the tools are used to build a tool chest from scratch to put the tools in. I just need tar to coat it and make sure the wood does not crack and bend. Check out one of the earlier videos here:    • Off-grid forge part1 Stone Hammer   and the first one of proper woodwork here:    • Making a Mästermyr chest off-grid part1  

How pine tar is made:

First I adapt the ditch into a kiln by making a wooden pipe and cover it with dirt. The important part at this stage is to make sure the dirt does not fall into the kiln; hence the stones. Then all the bottom is covered in birch bark, not to make tar but to transport the tar down to the pipe, it is important to make sure the sheets overlap in a way that prevent tar to poor into the dirt. Fatwood is stacked as tightly as possible in the direction tar is supposed to flow, this might prove a bit tricky due to the bent shapes of roots. Eventually the whole pile is covered in birch bark, fir twigs, grass tufts and then dirt, all is covered except the highest point of the pile where lit charcoal is placed.

The charcoal then heats the fat wood but the kiln shall not be too hot. The brown quality tar occurs due to two reasons; one is that the temperature is kept relatively low the other is that the parts that do become warm cools down rather quickly as it pours out. A high temperature would make wood coal and sot darkening the tar making the liquid less concentrated whilst the low temperatures makes it more resilient and long lasting when applied on wood. That is why I keep smothering the flames.

When a large enough coaling of the fat wood has occurred I choke the top, waited a little bit and then opened up another air-hole in the bottom of the highest part… the most western part of the kiln, tar comes out in the eastern lower end… That way the wood will release tar but the tar will also slowly be pushed down closer to the pipe throughout the process. After a while I open up holes on the sides and then further down on the sides to keep pushing it downwards.

The smoke is the que, blue almost clear smoke means a high temperature and thick white smoke a lower temperature. It is important that the fatwood inside the kiln carbonizes without combusting/burning to much. The bluish smoke implies fire in the kiln… but this changes somewhat after a few hours. In the end no smoke is quite as thick as in the beginning, at that point it is mainly flames that are supposed to be avoided. I try to showcase the different sorts of smoke in the video throughout the process. When I made this batch it started to rain in the end of the process. The rain cooled down the kiln quite a bit and forced me to raise the temperature by opening all the air holes again. This action made a lot of the coal burn but allowed a bit more tar to come out.

Some numbers:

Eventually I collected around two liters (0,5 gallon) of brown tar. The tar was mixed with a little bit of turpentine that evaporated within a few days but prior to that mixed into the tar when heated. The preparations of braking pine stumps took about a day. Making the kiln took about a day. Filling it and covering it about half a day and then burning about 24 hours. The first centiliter of tar had dripped out about 10 hours after lighting the kiln but it did not start pouring continually until about three hours later, this is when I took out the plug. When the rain came (and woke me up) about 22 hours into the process tar kept coming in small amounts for another few hours until I called it a day and went to sleep again. The way I see it two liter of tar took about 36 hours to make. Even if many of those hours was spent on other work as well, like making birch bark slöjd, preparing the next kiln or making brushes and such, here is the video where I made brushes:    • Brush made of human hair