I finally had some free time and some nice weather to work on some firewood. Ma nature provided a bunch of red maple in a little gust of wind last weekend, so I mostly worked on that. I cut and loaded up everything that I'm taking for firewood - there's an 8' saw log and another 16'+ of trunk that I'm going to save for lumber. I noticed another one of my maple saw logs was starting to turn. That one has a really nice burl too that I completely forgot about. So that became a GIBIR rescue mission. Turns out the rot really isn't so bad yet - it's mostly just at the surface. But I ended up taking about 1/2 of that log for firewood - there's 6' of that left and milling that up will be next on the to-do list. Some of the maple and cherry logs that I milled earlier this summer were about 15' from this one; with those out of the way, I have a nice path right in there. This was the first load - most of the tops from the first tree: 2nd load - the rest of the firewood from the first tree, and the burl plus a few rounds from the other one. I sawed the burl + roughly 2" slab off freehand.
Actually, these pics were from 2 days worth of work... :stacke: I cut up the rest of trunk from the red maple yard tree I had taken down a couple weeks ago. The tree had been pruned several times incorrectly on the driveway side, and it looks like one of the wounds was collecting water and rotting out. Anyway that's all firewood now too. I assembled my homemade pallet too, mostly: I'm still short a couple of screws... Got both loads of firewood sawn up, and a little bit of it split. There's going to be more than enough to fill my pallet.
Well, just storing them in the garage for now. I'm in the process of rearranging things in there. Not sure what I'm going to do with any of it yet really. Here's some walnut:
cool looking burl shawn. You know the firewood burns the same whether the ends are cut perfectly square or not
I hauled out the rest of the rounds from the 2nd tree. Still gotta square a couple of these up. I ended up with a couple of cool plant stands out of all of this too. This piece was the remaining 'cookie' from the yard tree trunk after I measured out my firewood lengths. This one came from the windfall tree. I've got a couple other hollowed out maple rounds that we've been using for planters around the house, but this is the coolest one yet. I think it's going to be a "living end table" for my porch.
I think I'm missing the "neat and tidy firewood" gene that enables one to crib properly and produce neat even stacks. Perhaps gene therapy can help me ...
me too... but I got an excuse rounds that were dropped off range from 10 to 20 inches... hard to stack square with different length splits Shawn, what can we say... your an inspiration and an true craftsman
Had some beautiful weather for splitting today. Didn't even break a sweat for the first hour or so this morning. Had some help from my girlfriend after breakfast; we got the trailer loaded and then rest of the maple split, minus a few large and stubborn pieces. We employed the "two stump bucket brigade" method - she'd set up the next round on one stump while I was splitting at the other stump. We got it all done before 1pm. We also had some help from my highly trained dog, Otis.
Looks good Shawn. Weather sure helps doesn't it. How's Otis been doing lately? He looks perty content right there.
