A couple pictures for the picture lovers here A 140 year old pine tree died from wilt a couple years ago and I got the trunk and a couple branches dropped off in my yard. I got them bucked up and decided to stack them, mostly for the fun of it. A neighbor is having a small woodlot cleared and said I could take anything I wanted. So I got all the honey locust I could find. In both cases, I've got the Fiskars IsoCore there for scale. A couple nice little scores.
What little locust is split (on the top of the pile) was split with the Isocore. It actually was working pretty good. I'd be more concerned about trying to split those pine rounds without hydraulics. They're gonna take several bites before they fall apart.
I love honey locust. I find it splits super easy green if it came from a woods. Yard/thornless honey locust needs a little more effort.
Be fun to see how many strikes with the Isocore those pine rounds would take to eventually split. Definitely not impossible.
Yeah, it could be done. But I'd rather split the locust by hand. Much more satisfying to watch it blow apart. I may end up renting a splitter just to try out the vertical feature on those rounds. Otherwise I'll use the forklift to pick them up and set them on the splitter shown in my avatar. How do you think I got them stacked without killing myself?
Great score! I haven't yet had the privilege of burning honey Locust, but have converted many a pine to ash and heat.. Love the stuff!
My brother (who heats exclusively with wood) scoffs at the pine. But then, he's got a pre-EPA furnace that burns everything down pretty good. My Woodstock IS tends to fill up with coals on a hardwood-only diet. So it's nice for me to have some softwood every couple days. I figure that should be enough pine to last me a year or two. The locust will be for the overnight burns a couple years from now.
Yep - proper use of pine has saved me many trips with a full ash pail. Running the owb 24/7 from November till March leaves quite a bit of ash if I don't burn it down regularly. Dry pine has saved me from having mountains of the stuff around. Good for a quick warm-up if I've been gone for a long time and the fuel is low, too.
In all naiveness and as a by the book "hardwood only" disciple, what indeed is the "proper use of pine"? Is it merely a matter of getting the stove nice and hot with hard wood prior to placing said conefirous into the stove?
For my purposes, it's just loading the dry pine onto a bed of coals and letting the whole mess burn down. Whereas the hardwood will leave more coals, the pine will burn down to ash, and take a bunch of the residual hardwood coals with it. Before discovering this "trick" I was dumping ash every week or so, losing coals in the process, or running the risk of being stuck with so many coals and ash that I couldn't get a proper amount of wood into the owb. The pine does a great job of burning everything down to a nice ash bed.
Correct. The IS can easily fill completely full of coals on a steady diet of ashwood. Those coals give off some heat, but not nearly enough for my purposes. So I stuff in pine for short hot burns during the day while letting those hardwood coals burn down.
The rounds have a nice visual effect when stacked like that. Just leave them that way and call it wood art.
I know, I love just looking at those pictures. But I can't leave the pine. The locust is anchored by those cedar trees, so it's pretty stable, but that pine is a dangerous deadfall trap. I can't let the kids play around it as is, it needs to be split and double-stacked fairly soon.
