New Project for the Chainsaw, and Post Maul. Old School, sort of.

I was needing to build a bigger dog pen, for my growing litter of pups. I have been blowing a lot of money lately on chainsaws and stuff, so I decided I wasn't excited about buying a bunch of materials and spending more money, to build this dog pen. And so I decided to make my chainsaws help pay for themselves.

Since I had recently fixed up my dad's old post maul, I decided to go cut some Red Cedar posts and sharpen them and drive them in the ground to support the boards. That went well, and I sunk them pretty deep, they are as solid as if had dug holes and poured them in concrete.

I would go find a suitable Cedar tree and cut all of the limbs off if for about 6- 7ft then fall it, and cut a V notch in top of the stump to hold the base of the tree while I sharpened it with my chainsaw. Worked really good.

I salvaged the 2 x 10's treated from lumber I salvaged when I had to replace my deck on my house. The 2 x 10's are over 30 yrs old but still solid, unfortunately, I didn't have enough to finish the job. I thought about going and buying some more treated wood to finish the pen, but instead I decided to try cutting some long cedar poles and splitting them in half with my chainsaw. And that worked great. It only took me about an hour to harvest that one pole, split it and nail it on.

I found a suitable tree and cut all of the limbs off of it as high as I could reach, then I bored a cut through the tree and cut up and down to split the tree as far as I could, then I cut the tree down, and used the same trick of cutting a V notch in the stump and laying the base of the trunk in that notch, and finished splitting and delimbing the tree, then cutting off the top last thing, and I am done. I used my Jonsered saw with my hand square filed chain to split the tree with and that worked great.

A few hours tomorrow and I should be done, and I am only out some nails and chainsaw gas and oil.

 

I'm impressed! Especially that you could drive those posts into the ground. I remember my dad building fence when I was a kid & he had to dump a 55gal barrel of water for every post in the Arkansas clay. Greenbrier was where we were back then.

 

The ground is sandy loam soil with lots of sand stones but no flint rocks. And the timing was good. We have had this freeze but the ground was thawing out, and fairly wet. You start out by using a crowbar and jabbing a funnel shaped hole as deep as you can in the soil, then stab the post into the hole you've made and hammer away. The post were a little tall at first and I usually had to stand in the back of my a pickup bed or the bed of my side by side for the first few hits with the post maul. It helps to be as accurate as possible and hit the post square with the maul. But it's a lot faster then digging post holes and tamping rocks or pouring ready-mix concrete in the holes.

 

Nicely done!

 

Nice work!

 

Nice job.

 

Thanks, Guys

I finished it today, finally. It went well. Good exercise, dragging those boards out of the woods, and I learned a little bit about ripping boards with a chainsaw. I was starting to get the hang of it, by the time I got done. The best straightest trees, are in the thickets where they have to grown tall and straight to compete for sunlight. But hard to fall in there without hanging up on more trees. On one tree I had to cut three others down to get it on the ground, then drag out by hand because it's too thick to get the side by side in. But it wasn't that bad.

Here's a few pictures, got a good one of the pups, too. They are starting to need more room, glad I got off of butt and got the pen done.