Making Pitch Glue in Clam Shells

Cooking up a batch of Sitka spruce pitch glue on the beach. I am relatively new to playing with pitch glue, and am beyond impressed with how well it binds materials together and how useful it is. Most people recommend adding animal dung or other plant fillers into the mix, but so far I have had great results just mixing the melted pitch with powdered charcoal from the fire.

A stone with a natural divot made for a nice field-expedient mortar and pestle and some clam shells provided containers for gathering, carrying, heating, and mixing up the pitch.

I did have some concern that the shell might break as it heated, and did not like the thought of being sprayed down with hot pitch, so I heated it slowly; allowing the shell to warm up and transfer the heat into the sap.

I have been playing around with some primitive archery lately, so I used some of this glue to attach a very crude stone with an edge to a foreshaft, and this glue held it in place just as well as the Douglas fir based mixtures I’ve been using in my local woods. It is just a little bit tackier when cool, but I’m not sure if that is a property of the sap, or a function of the cooking process.

Here’s a short video that shows how well this kind of glue holds up…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy5EY2LYi6w