Fire Felling a Tulip Tree for a Dugout Canoe

Kevin Finney (www.pathwayscrg.org) and myself, Erik Vosteen (www.burntmud.com) assited a group of fifth grade students at Goodwillie Environmental School, Ada, MI as they built a dugout canoe using mostly pre steel tools. We began by burning the tree down. In the process, we found many valuable clues that have helped us to understand the historical accounts of dugout canoe building and also to make sense of the various dugouts we have found in museums and other collections. The project has also added significantly to our combined decades of knowledge related to the tools, technologies, and processes that pre historic people relied on daily. Watch for more snippets of this project as we turn this log into one of the replica ancient canoes you can view on our websites.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• dugout
• canoe
• boat
• burning
• fire
• felling
• cutting
• tree
• primitive
• skills
• pre
• historic
• logging
• log
• tulip
• poplar
• building

[Verradonairun]

great, now you can move on to burning an indentation in the log :D lol, takes too long!!!! besides isn't the circumference of the tree to small for a canoe?

[loosanarrow]

We did just that. Check the website - video of burning logs just is not very exciting. Burning removes about 2 cm (3/4 inch) per 1 1/2 hour burn. Most dugouts are less than 30 cm (12 inches) deep, and have a 3 to 5 cm (1 to 2 inches) thick bottom, so one must only do about 12 to 15 burns, and this was done in about 3 days of work. I suppose it depends on what one considers "too long". As for the tree size, again, check out the pictures on the website. Many are larger, but many are also narrower.

[dramsey2k4]

cool idea, but do you see the irony in using saw cut wood as fuel?

[loosanarrow]

Indeed. Our intent here was not to explore gathering firewood without steel tools, but in the course of other projects we have gathered wood fuel without steel tools and there is actually not much difference in total effort required to gather the wood - it is simply moved in longer lengths and burned into separate pieces on the fire or fed into the fire one end first. Good observation though. Other projects show that the amount of wood used here could be gathered by a group of ten in hours nosaw

[JaasterMareel]

ok it was kinda cool! but what keept you from using an axe or a saw, to get that tree down?

[loosanarrow]

Nothing - other than we wanted to try fire.

[wallacewithoutgromit]

I would think you would want and the Native Americans had a "tag Line" several tens of feet up in that tree to control when and where it fell. Thus would considerably reduce accidents and hang ups in other trees.

[Verradonairun]

okay...now that you said 3 days of work it doesn't seem like too long, however I can think of 1 other way to do it, which requires less material, time and effort.

[RubyRedRose1]

I was part of the first year they did a burnt out canoe. Mr. Finney does a great job I loved our canoe. I bet Mr. G was excited too!

[loveandanarchy1111]

That is so cool!.....