Always good to have a little pine if not a lot on hand. Great for starting fires or getting sluggish fires to crank out the heat Most times when I pass it up its because I can see the sap oozing so I usually only take long dead stuff.
the bark almost looks like ash which says Norway maple to me IMO. I was working on it again this afternoon after the rain let up. Did you get the pine tar off? Will a jar of miracle whip be standard in your tool box? If not for pine sap mebbe on your sandwich? Good looking score BTW!
Only more pine tar since last post. I put the gloves away and then unloaded the car score (real smart, I know). I’ll probably try some veggie oil first, and then miracle whip if I get hungry, i’ll Grab a handful.
I agree with buZZsaw BRAD on the Norway maple which is a slight positive as far as btu's. Logs are in great shape, no degrading condition and I like the way you transport your hoards... Car hoarding at it's finest mrfancyplants !
OK, OK i know im not a car hoarder, but this tiny score today had to be posted somewhere. Went to recycling center this afternoon to unload plastics, cans etc. The wood dump is 1/4 mile around the corner. Guess where i went. The huge mound had been ground up and two new piles started. The rain had just ended so puddles, mud, wet etc. Grabbed four logs that i could. Didnt feel like getting that muddy & wet for a few more logs. my first piece of locust ever scrounged, an historic day! looks like someone threw out a large quantity of seasoned splits! Bunch of Eastern red cedar rounds. Being wet from the rain, it smelled like a cedar chest...much better than the wet compost smell!
Shame about the mud and sour compost smell buZZsaw BRAD , but that there dump would be a spot I'd visit regularly! I have nothing like that mountain of logs at my crappy dump.
well to most of you it's the weekend, but for me it's the official first day of my Summer break. I decided to use my first morning off to visit a construction zone by my house that I have had my eyes on for well over a year. There is a historic psychiatric ward and quarantine hospital for infectious disease building by my house that when I moved here almost 30 years ago was closed down and then became a cancer research facility and then that closed a few years ago. It was a large complex and many smaller buildings were torn down and that space was converted into gated town homes, but this main remaining building (pictured here that I took off a blog called the "Forgotten Past of New Jersey") is being gutted and turned into condo's because as all of you here know you cant build enough condos...Yay! everyone will get to live in cubicles! Anyway around back of the place is a construction dump site that has all kinds of rubble including this pile of logs. I even used the ruble piles to help get me some old brick for my pizza oven, but I left the log pile there untouched for almost two years not wanting to take wood that belonged to someone else. Well recently when I got some cement rubble to create the foundation for my oven I noticed a 30 yard dumpster that was filled with some of the rock and cement rubble. I was thinking that maybe they are starting to cart away the piles, but still the logs were untouched at that point. Today I noticed more filled dumpsters and much smaller piles of debris. I also noticed the log pile seemed smaller because I remember mulberry wood being there which was no longer. Well I am now convinced this stuff is slated for the landfill and so I am going to take what I can. Mostly the wood that was in front small enough to take this round was wild black cherry, but there is some larger maple and big black birch. Much is very heavy and also gnarly so I will take what I can and who knows, if I feel comfortable in the future I will take some splitting wedges with me to pear the logs down. I was hoping with all this time sitting in the pile that they would be a bit more seasoned, but with this past rainy and soggy season these logs were pretty saturated. I'm guessing that the big one in the middle of my rack was 150 to 175lbs. This is the pile after unloading and now waiting to be split. Unfortunately some of the bigger logs are cut to 20" lengths which is a little larger than I like and pushing the limits of my stove, but you cant complain about wood already cut to size.
I think that pile can be classified as unwanted. Might as well help yourself before it winds up in the dumpster. I would take the black birch over the cherry, better BTUs, easier to split, and dries faster. If you can get at it.
Yes, agree. Already started whacking away at the cherry and a lot of thudding before cracking open. Also a bit of hidden knots and spiral grain. Problem with the black birch is the size being so huge, I'm not sure I'm man enough to lift into car. May need to bring the wedges.
I like to split before putting in the car. Especially if it is too big to carry, but also you can squeeze a bit more on top and in between the rounds when you are car hoarding. It also helps if you know which rounds are unsplittable so that you can leave em be. My latest maple score however, I wanted to save some splitting for this winter when it is cold.
Yes mrfancyplants I like splitting on site as well for all those reasons you mentioned. However, It's in circumstances like this where technically I can be considered trespassing I would rather not want to bring attention to myself banging away at wedges. Even though it's obvious to me these logs will become landfill I still just want to grab and go, but we will see. My approach for this pile will be to keep taking whole logs that I can handle and leave the biggest ones for last. I will then decide if I want to take these bigger logs by splitting on site, logic being by that time if someone raises a fuss I will have already gotten a good amount for myself.
I worked late yesterday, got home and spotted my lonely piece of locust. Had the 290 and Fiskars in the PU so i cut and split. Nice and dense. Split easy. The bark reminds me of a "sassafras on steroids"! Not only am i wanting to hoard wood, now im jonesing for it to be locust. Thought i had some along the interstate and stopped yesterday to investigate. It was aspen and ginkgo (i think). Left it there.
Yes locust is great buZZsaw BRAD , However its not always a love affair. For one the smell of the cambium layer in the bark when wet and rotting can make your processing area smell like a farm not to mention your fingers from handling it. Two, it can be rock hard when cutting a log that has been drying for a while and this can slow things down. and finally three, it has silica or some related mineral inside it's cell structure that makes it noticeably clear your blade is dulling after cutting through a few logs. Now would I ever pass on black locust? NO WAY! I want to add that your slice of locust there is a particularly pretty specimen. I'm going to attribute that to the very clean cross cut. It seems looking at your cuts they are like razor smooth so I can appreciate how sharp you keep your chain.
"She's my Cherry Pie-ile" Well I hit the pile again and I realized on further inspection that the wood I thought was black birch was actually flowering cherry. I got thrown off by the smooth papery peeling bark and the large size. The fact that there is quite a few of these cherry logs that are straight clean without crotch or branches which is rare for the more smaller ornamental cherry made me think birch. So this pile is about 95% cherry wood from what can I see. I did see a few logs of elm, but nahhh no thanks! I'm starting to realize why this wood remained here so long without being raided by other wood hoarders. The size of the wood is beyond the abilities for the average person especially when you factor in having to climb the pile and pick logs out to throw down. Im taking big wood, but believe it or not these are the smaller pieces with many pieces there being in the range of 250 to 300lbs. Also because of all the earth moving rigs that mess around near the pile the ground is deeply tire grooved and riddled with broken bits of rubble. I think on an up coming Sunday morning with no one working on the construction site I will feel comfortable enough to try the wedges. I will have to, there aren't too many left that are small enough for me to lift. One annoying thing is most logs are cut to 25" + lengths so I need to cut them down for my stove that can take 20 inches but prefers 16" to 18". It's ok though, I grill with wood and that is what I will do with the smaller disks after splitting them up into smaller chunks. Well that's all for now folks, hope you're all enjoying the dry sunny weather!
