Thanks for bringing this back OhioStihl. Would love to know how much firewood you actually get out of that beast when your all done.
If I may suggest, I've taken apart many of those big Oaks. 54" DBH was the biggest, & a 62" Hard Maple. You're in a clear work area too, that's a real plus. Mark the trunk to lengths, I think you said 18", cut through as far as you can to the bottom. Then noodle the butt end up to your saw kerf, in this manner you drop smaller pieces off one or two at a time, split them down into loadable size & not have to wrestle huge chunks.
That sounds like a plan. I’ve been doing more noodling lately, this tree is a perfect candidate for it.
I get elbow surgery in three days. I’ll be out of commission for the saw and big rounds but I’m still going to move small stuff with tongs and the hookaroon. The next big attack on this tree might be late March or early April.
Count the rings when you get to the bottom, would love to know how old it is. Hope the surgery goes well.
Good luck with the surgery and recovery. Sucks to be out of CSS when you have wood like that on deck, but better to be out when the weather sucks!
I've gotten 3 and 1/4 cords out of a 30" DBH solid red oak and that was having the tops under 6 inches chipped. I quartered the trunk rounds with wedges and a sledge hammer to make them manageable, having a horizontal only splitter at the time. I've split quite a bit of red oak with wedges when I couldn't swing an axe because of my back. It will be great to this one split and put up and the final tally.
Agreed - I had to do a big crotch this way recently. In my case a sledge and a couple wedges came in handy for breaking off the chunks after cutting vertically.
If you didn't yet , it will help you a lot if you put a bunch of your tops under the butt log. Keep it off the ground , save your chains .AND gives a bit of height to let exhaust disapate and less chance of getting hung up when finishing a buck. Looks like a good score. I don't think I could make firewood out of that butt log if its sound. Lots of great flooring there.
Noodling? Not familiar with the term. What does it mean in case I find a monster like that just lying around.
Looking good so far, limiting yourself a bit as you go will help you ease into the gathering season too. Hope to see more soon!
Cutting a log with the chainsaw instead of lifting onto the splitter. Makes long noodles instead of chips when cutting along the grain vs across the grain.
With wood that sized, you need to recruit old retired guys with more saws than brains: (well with not enough sense to know how to flip this cell phone pic over anyway, call me Mr. Dumass)
