Are cribbed ends okay for wood stacks?

They can be so supportive some times......

But they sure feel differently about it when the cold winds of winter blow!

 

I crib my stacks for the most part but lately I have been having a hard time cribbing because I have no flat/straight pieces. Any ideas?

 

More practice or use the T-posts with a rope/cord run between the two ends about 2' high.

 

T posts?

 

If all I have are less than ideal in shape I'll grab some splitter trash/ kindling and use it to shim up any tipsy pieces. Then try to use the oddball shapes to your advantage: while each layer may not come out perfectly level and plumb, you continually correct as best you can with what you got on the way up.

 

thats a nice lot of wood you have there.

 

Even if you have crooked wood ( lol) , you can make flats by splitting the wood so the "jog" goes East or West vs north or south. If you catch my drift.

Splitting rounds in half, directly in the center works well too, if the wood is straight.

Hydraulic spltters help immensely in making flats for cribbing purposes.

 

Thank you sir! Those two pictures are reserve/2018,19 possibly 2020 the way winters have been.

 

You said it brother!

 

Thats pretty impressive!

 

Ive been enjoying cribbing and think its a great way to end a row. I strive to make it off of vertical a bit so if it starts pushing I dont have a leaning wall. I also try to avoid stacking splits up against it that I think will give it to much push. Although Im not a master like some of you Ive had pretty good success. I just take the best looking pieces out of my splitter piles and piece them together and they seem to work out fine. I havent had any fall over which is good and if I do no big deal I would just rebuild it!

 

I usually hear something like "You're getting another load of wood? Jeeze, how much is enough?"

I'll answer with "remember how cold we were that winter we ran out of firewood?"

She'll say "We never ran out of firewood!" Me..."Exactly!"

 

I was working outside earlier building a mud kitchen for my daughter. Its going right in front of my most recent stacks, and I gotta say, holy crap is my first attempt at cribbing ugly! I gotta get a picture of it in all its glory tomorrow.

 

I think the biggest trouble i have is that i will start with a flat piece but the adjustment seems to show the wood teeter totters. Plus must not be making my cribbing wide enough. More ends sticking out means i need to adjust, correct?

 

Here's my basic strategy - hopefully the diagram makes it easier to understand than my usual ramblings:


If your cribs seem stable already, they're probably fine. But if you want indestructible stacks that you can drop 2' diameter trees on, try my method.
Keep your points of contact towards the outer edges of the crib, and shim as needed to eliminate teeter totter-ing.