Thor I have enough room for 3 years worth of wood. I get air flow under the walls of the building and the wood is stacked on 2x4 floors on timbers with space between the 2x4's. The sliding doors on the end are open year round except for the winter months when I close just half of it to keep snow from blowing in. I am finally getting started splitting and stacking wood outside for a year before moving it inside.
Please bring this up at the gtg. It is rare here for red maple to be wavy and it splits super easy. Also will dry in less than a year.
I cookied off some of the maple so that it would fit nicer in my stove as a warm up before I attacked the cherry. Chainsawing is a lot more work than I thought it would be. I still have a lot more o go on the standing cherries and good progress on sizing te rounds, but more to go yet. Maybe I need to sharpen the chain? Also I ended up slipping the chain.. it seemed to be stretching out as I went; Is that a sign of bad technique? I think I can get it put back together and tightened up with a wrench.
Sounds like you need to tighten the chain, and sharpen it. How many tanks of gas have you used so far?
A new chain will stretch till it wears in. Any dirt or debris will dull a chain very quickly. Sharp chain should throw chips not dust. Always fill oil & gas together, as lack of oil to the bar will smoke a chain very quickly. To tension the chain, tighten till you can pull the top of chain up to the point that the drive links don't come above the bar rail. Hope this helps.
I always check the bar oil when filling up the fuel, even though it uses a bit less. Also make sure the chain is taut and sharp. If you start seeing smaller/less chips, it's probably time for a chain touch up. The whole process is a lot of work, but very worthwhile when you can look at it in a couple years (more or less) and know it's going to heat your house.
Yard tree? For sure any tree that is grown in a yard or a fence row can turn out more twisted and harder to split.
I have had no problems with Red Maple burning all winter in the Pacific Energy T5. The wood you see in the picture is it and like it a lot. But now I have to go down and talk with the fella that owns the land as some lying POS down the road has been making up some great stories about me?
A little deflating looking at the pile of results, but I think I’m conflating the work involved with the maple and the cherries i’ve been working on... and the time getting up to speed with the chain saw. The longer splits to the left I’m going to give to the neighbor who lent me the saw, and the thicker splits will go on the bottom of a palate stack for two years out. I may go generous on the cherry for the neighbor too, because he has a truck and there is enough maple in the round to get me to two or three years, depending on how much he wants. It sure would be easier if the rounds weren’t so long. I need to see if the 20” splits can fit in the stove diagonally. As that would save a lot of re-cutting. There is tons of red maple around including my off center one in the background. Red maple might become my go-to with it’s high heat to cure time ratio.
I got another boot plus size serving at the all you can heat, red maple buffet. I tried to pick up all the shorter rounds I could on the low hanging fruit philosophy, just so I don’t have to cut them down to size. I didn’t shy away from the wider rounds however. I hand split them into liftable chunks and walked them to the car trunk. The long stack is mostly Bradford pear for two years out, and I added the thickest twisted splits of maple to that pile since they’ll be on a similar timeframe. I have three old pallets behind the shed that I’ve been putting the med maple splits on for next year. And the tiny splits i’ll filling in my pile for this fall.
That’s what the brits call a trunk. Trying to talk the neighbor into bringing his truck into the equation. He has a fire pit and a fire place, so the long rounds should work for him... i’m Not sure I want to re-buck any long rounds. Although maybe it goes smoother with a sharp chain. I was just smoking it trying to cut off some cookies.
