Saturday 26 March 2016

Firewood and the toast rack


I store my potential firewood in 2m by 3m woodpiles, using stakes at 1m intervals round the boundary to hold the wood together.  I'll post more about that another time.  I keep the wood largely in two forms:   small diameter (up to 10-15 cm) as cordwood (long pieces) and larger diameter as roundwood (up to the size I can move; bigger than that gets split before going into the pile.  See below.    The advantage of this is that if anyone decides to take some of my wood, they need to do the work to make it a suitable size to burn rather than me, which is less irritating for me, and makes it less likely to happen.



When converting cordwood into firewood lengths (about 20 cm) I start off when working a new woodpile by setting up a "toast rack"




Empty toast rack

The posts are about 1.5m, sharpened, and bonked in with my post bonker so that they are firmly embedded in the ground.  They're about 20cm apart in each row, and maybe 50cm between the rows.  The distance between the rows depends on your chainsaw, mine has a 16" bar.  Then at the bottom I put a some timber that I don't mind just sawing into, so that I can easily saw right through the wood I'm working on.



Full toast rack

Then I stack the cordwood between the two rows

Firewood

And saw down.  I start at the far ends of the pile, working inwards from both ends to keep it balanced, then sawing between the posts.   One thing  to watch out for is that as the lengths of wood being sawed get shorter, they may decide to spin rather than be cut, which can be a bit disconcerting, and sometimes pieces of wood fly out, so it's important to stand so that they won't hit you (and of course personal protective equipment).    And there it is.  In 10-15 minutes with the chainsaw, all that wood is now ready to burn.


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