Perfect opportunity for anyone in Southern New England! I have enough of my own spruce to process for the time being... Look at all that beautiful shoulder season and campfire wood! FREE! I'll bet some of our west of the Mississippi River contingent that live a bajillion feet above sea level would drool over these bad boys. So the question remains ~ What do you think would be worse ~ splitting all this by hand, struggling through hundreds of knots, OR being exiled to a small cabin on the edge of the tundra in the Northwest Territories of Canada for a winter, with nothing to burn but endless cords of Balsa wood??? What says the hive mind? Spruce logs - free stuff
Pain now, enjoy later? Your burn time on the spruce would probably be a good hour versus the Balsa, which if you loaded the stove to the gills would probably be about 5 minutes... 5 minutes of huddling over the stove watching in vain as the fire dies down.
Knot for me. Never burned balsa so it would be an interesting experience on the tundra. Does the cabin have a TV and wifi? Need to stay connected with FHC of course.
Very good WIFI, furnished with a HUGE TV and the best amenities. Your choice of food brought in to you every week via dogsled team/ice road trucker maniacs. Bring your GF along for company. The only drawback is at -70F having to feed said Balsa into the stove nonstop
No GF...ill smuggle some BL in there. No need to ask if theres a fridge. I leave the ice cream outside!
Pretty sure balsa trees grow along the equator. What's with cutting the branches so far from the trunk ? WTF does that ? From my own very, very limited experience with spruce (one blue spruce yard tree) I would much rather split and burn eastern white pine. The spruce was a bear to split and was like splitting rubber.
Pain is an understatement. On the knotty sections it can be near impossible to split by hand without hydraulics. Being soft wood it just absorbs the blows of a maul.
Yeah I'm just going way out into left field with this just to stir up some banter. It's not like any of us would ever be put into a bizarre predicament like this.
I take spruce for free any time I can get it. Admittedly, I run an OWB, but still - I can reliably get a 12 hour burn out of it up until mid-December and any time after April 1st. I just add about 1/3 more per firebox. Also, softwood helps burn down an overly deep coal bed mid winter without having to throw out perfectly good hardwood coals! I do let it dry a year or more.
Agreed, I've successfully hand split Eastern White Pine over the years without too much aggravation. It helps processing it in the bitter cold too. The Blue Spruce I acquired over the summer was a different animal altogether. 60% of it I had to use the splitter on. I'd try working it back and forth with the maul and the spruce would just laugh at me. Lesson learned, although the stuff I have does seem to burn really well.
Nice niche to be in with the OWB. I'm sure there's more free spruce available than there are people that actually want to burn it. I have almost a cord myself that I have reasonably high hopes for in the next couple shoulder seasons. Heck I'll even mix it in with the hardwoods just to stretch things farther. I'll bet it's good to get a cold start going to establish your draft.
Spruce with a hydraulic splitter is ok. It's a pain by maul or axe. So this hypothetical cabin in the frozen tundra. Is there an endless supply of good beer to go skiing with the endless supply of balsam fir? Grab a split, take a sip.
I’ve buried the wedge of my 28 ton splitter in a spruce round, water pouring out, then the hydraulic line blew. Take it to the dump. There’s some nice lumber grade pine logs in West Hartford right now if anyone’s interested.
