Saw an ad on CL by a small tree service company, saying to come, cut and take for free from their yard or will deliver 15 ton (6-8 cord) for $350.00. Ad states logs are 16" all way up to 5' diameter. First time I've seen tree company advertise around here. It's about 20 -30 minutes from my house.
Stuck at work They say there's 70-90 tons of wood, with more coming. Hopefully no one like Buzzsaw Brad saw it, might be gone.
There is a tree service here in CO that offers a similar plan. You pull up and they load your truck/trailer with a crane. The bummer is that they give you the stuff they don’t want to cut and split and sell themselves. Mostly long pieces of huge knotty pine and cottonwood, which is super tough to Split. Here are a couple pics from their yard.
Seems like someone else posted once about a tree service doing this very thing. Good idea. It costs them to get rid of it so why not just give it away?
Cheap or free wood is great but be careful of what you get. Some REAL gnarly nasty dirt encrusted junk IMO. Tree guys know what "good wood" is and will put that aside. If you can go and pick out what you get maybe?
Yeah, even for free I'm not so sure I'd want a truckload of crotches. Big stuff if you have a saw to rip thru them is fine, slow going maybe, but crotches that don't like to split and have to be cut is a bit of time and gas. I have five or six crotches waiting on me to feel like battling them and making lots of noodles. I have gotten a skip tooth chain for a large wood project and also want to see if noodling oak crotches with skip tooth is easier/faster/worthwhile. If you don't have a lot of time to put towards firewooding, nice straight logs gets you there a lot faster. But hey if you have the time and ambition it can be a fun project. 16 inches and up sounds like they might have a processor that has a 16 inch limitation and they just don't have the margin to mess with paying guys to stand there and cut firewood. Labor cuts into processing margins real fast.
From the pic looks like most is straight, though there are some crotchy looking pieces. Guess I'll see when I get there
16" and under goes right in the chipper with most the tree services around me unless the homeowner is keeping the wood.
Guys picking up 16" oak logs and throwing them in a chipper must be a sight to see. A small tree service company around here would be lucky to afford a 8 inch chipper. The bigger operators might have the capital to invest in a 12 inch bandit. Even a 12 inch Bandit is getting a bit large for some neighborhood streets without having to hire a cop for traffic control.
Do you hand split or have hydraulics? I have no problem with the knotty or crotch pieces, grew up splitting by hand, so I know how to put them in the splitter. May not stack to straight, but they burn great.
