We use pine needles for mulch and landscaping here in the south. In your flower beds too look nice and keep the weeds down. Good long leaf pine needles are $5 a bale. Bales are smaller than straw bales. Maybe 80-90% of the size.
I think we might have it, the new stacking area will hold two more stacks, each 16 feet long. If I can get some trail clearing done real quick, I might be able to start cutting again. I would go for another two cord, it's been a good year for cutting.
Yeah I wanted to use wood chips too. I picked up a little 8hp chipper off of CL for $200 something. What a joke that thing is. Runs great, and the guy even ran a couple branches through. After I got it home I realized it would probably take me an entire weekend just to get through the pile of 1" branches from a single tree. I even sharpened it, but it didn't make much of a difference. Sending that thing back to CL land shortly. Need to buy or rent a real one.
Much better Sav, I think it was my sinuses. I did do one load of Pine needles then I grabbed a load of Maple from up top so I could finish this stack.
Zap have no idea what that stump is, but a slab of it would make a nice looking door warming gift, with a name carved/burned into it. The stacks are coming together nicely...as always
I'll be splitting the rounds from that stump, that should tell me if it's Elm or not. How thick should the slab be? I did plan on pulling the stump so a piece off it is possible.
If you're pulling the stump whole I have no idea how thick. If you wrap the cookie in some waxed craft paper should limit the checking, it's hit/miss with most of them
Is this the way it could be done? http://www.lowes.com/creative-ideas/woodworking-and-crafts/woodburning-basics/article
"How thick" depends on the application. End grain "cookies" are very weak. Something like a sign should see minimal impact, as long as you don't drop it. Stump wood makes some of the coolest lumber though. I used wood burning on my road sign for the house. Used some tracing paper to copy the original, and transfer paper to plot it onto the new one.
Did you draw your own letters on or did you transfer lettering off a sheet of paper from the computer on the wood, if so, how? I think that I'll try this. http://blog.theswankeeyankee.com/2012/05/24/diy-wood-burned-sign/
I traced most of it from the original sign, because I wanted to keep the same look. I lifted the bird design and all the numbers from the original, using tracing paper, with one side taped onto the original sign with blue painters tape. I used a second 1/2 sheet for the letters, so that I could re-position and center the lettering. That was mostly traced as well - the "R" came directly from the original, and the "C" and "U" were adapted from the original "O". The "Y" was the only "freehand" letter; but doing it on the tracing paper first let me draw/erase/redraw it, until it looked right. Once I had the lettering done, I aligned the two tracings and taped them together, and then used carbon transfer paper to transfer it onto the new sign. Once it was on the new sign, I just traced around and filled it in with the wood burning pen. If you can find a full size font lettering that you like, you could use the same sort of process. Woodworking specialty places also have sign lettering templates, but the font options may be more limited there. [EDIT] Basically the same process that you linked to. If you don't already have a high-end paint program to get the lettering from, there is a free one called "GIMP" that's very powerful. Actually MS Paint could do the job too; both would at least let you use the 100's of TrueType fonts already available on your PC.
Back when I was into wood burning(the art) mostly used stencils or free hand drawn directly on the wood. MS Paint will create thousands of fonts - you can scale letters print and transfer, a near endless free source. It's even more fun to do burned inlays - get good with a scalpel then burn
