Many years ago my mom used to get big loads of logs. Id cut and split and she stacked. I made a 4' stick with 16" increments to mark and cut. Fond memories.
Yep there is a method to the madness. I cut 48" because of the math you showed but also that is what I can still lift into my truck. I do not do any more than that because it will take more time to cut and load all the smaller pieces. I just want to get up into the mountains and get as much as I can in one day and get on home.
Nice. When I go buckin' it's typically for big stuff....like 24"+ so I kind of have to make it 16" high. With spruce I can lift up rounds that are 32" or so by myself but not oak or maple. Those big boys I end up splitting in half typically with the wedge and the sledge, just small enough so that I can lift it into the bed of the truck.
I cut to 80” for the same reason: 16”x5=80”. The front deck on my trailer is 8’ so when I load with a tractor or skid loader, I have some wiggle room. I use a retractable dog leash and a lumber crayon or sidewalk chalk to mark length. I made 16” marks with yellow paint and 80” marks with red paint on the leash. I have a bent horseshoe nail hooked onto the clip to anchor the end of the leash
Tape measurer and sidewalk chalk. Every 16", put a chalk mark. 16" measurements are pretty nice because the tape has red squares every 16" for framing.
made this today. Magnet with a piece of all thread cut to 16.5 inches. Magnet is a bit big for the bar shown but will work good on larger bars. Needs a coat of bright and its ready to go.
Looking good! If you put 2 nuts and a washer on the end of it then you can use it to sit in the previous mark if you're bucking a long log. Makes marking super satisfying.
These also work great on timber saws. I was cutting some 5-6" dead red oak up on my property and didn't feel like hauling the chainsaw around while I was wandering about so I just brought a timber saw and an Acc-U-Mark (same concept as your homemade making tool). Made the marks and cut the trees into 80" lengths to carry back through the woods to the house.
I'm old school and use a Spencer tape with Imperial & Metric. The metric side of these tapes is marked in "decimeters" i.e. 10 cm, and it turns out that 4 dm is almost exactly 16". It's easier form me to mark the logs at 4, 8, 12, 16 etc on the metric side, than to do 16, 32, etc. on the imperial side. It works for me, but I'm a kinda crazy...
Short term memory loss the first sign of...,uh, um, um,...oh crap i forgot what i was saying. Dont feel bad Mike, idve probably done the same thing!
My current method is a 16" piece of scrap 2x2 lumber and a small pruning saw. I've used lumber crayons and a tape measure frequently in the past, but have trouble marking wet or mossy logs. I find that scoring the trunk with one draw of the pruning saw is pretty reliable, and the 16" stick keeps me moving pretty quickly. I need to try sidewalk chalk. That sounds promising.
You can be new school also. Most tape measures nowadays have the 16,32,48, etc marks in red on them to show stud/joist layout on 16” spacing. How to Read a Tape Measure: the Definitive Guide - My Simpatico Life Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
