What Chainsaw do you run?

Nice!
Watch the beer partying on your upper deck though!!

 

That's going to make some very pretty, clean firewood! Not a knot in any of it. Don't get any bettern' that.

 

Recently added a Milwaukee M12 Hatchet to the yard-care tool box; thing is friggin awesome for all those little pruning and trimming jobs!

 

Split 2 cords today.... went well... beer kept the joints well greased!

 

Kept all the toes and fingers? I don't drink and don't work equipment with anyone drinking either. Fingers and toes are short enough, don't need to lose any inches with the splitter.

 

Beer is drank after saw work is done

 

Best practices followed.

 

I've been helping a friend expand her yard for a future horse paddock. We've been nibbling at it for a couple years. Made some good progress today. We clear (drop trees, limb em up and buck up anything up to 4" in diameter). Everything leftover is burned. Repeat as to keep things manageable for her. Many white oak trees. Today one was harder than anything I had ever experienced. Growth rings were very tight. Felt like I was cutting black locust. We've probably cleared over an acre total.

 

Awesome stuff!

 

Whenever I find a really "hard" tree I check my chain...it's usually time for a touchup. Not always, but usually.

 

Shouldn’t have make the saw cut ;-) I started carrying around a clamp on vise that I attach to my trailer if I’m on a job and mount the saw in there if I feel a full blade

 

Have you seen a stump vise? Google/Amazon you can find one easily. Cut a slot in a stump or block, insert vise and tighten on the bar. It holds very well and is a nice addition to the toolbox...but not as nice as a vise on a workbench in a nice warm shop with good lighting.

 

Yes soon as I searched this brother joe says and sends me a pic of a clamp on vise.... so I says ok I can save 20.00 ;-)

 

I had sharpened it after the previous use/outing. I cut down three white oaks that day and the following two were more "normal".

 

Back in the 90's our HOA sold the timber out of this 2200-acre neighborhood to augment our coffers. Anything over 14 inches got the saw. The loggers were drunk with the spectacle of the sheer density of our ancient timber and easy profit, wastefully leaving massive hardwood tree tops to be cut/split as firewood. As this is a retirement community it seems that only relatively young me was motivated to make Btu's out of what was left. I pulled a hand-built 4x8-foot tandem-axle lowboy behind my 4Trax 300 and selected only the finest, straightest grains out of that which was wasted: I was hand-splitting for lack of a powered splitter, so no nothing with knots came home, especially not hickory.

There was one massive white oak tree top laying on its side way out in the woods in front of my house, about 800 yards in. Some of its limbs were over two foot in diameter at their base, and where the loggers stopped harvesting the trunk was over 3 feet in diameter. I heated my house using a fireplace insert, and for two winters I did so with just the limbs that were easy to access off this tree top. I couldn't even reach the trunk from the ground to cut it: as massive as it was the large limbs held it aloft and too far up in the air to reach with the saw. Most of the limbs were high and off the ground too, and because of that they did not rot as they would if on the ground. I had to climb up fairly high into this white oak even though it was laying on its side and figure out in which order to safely cut the limbs so that when they fell they would reach the ground where I could saw them up. It was a Rubik's Cube of a tree-top rendering, me out there by myself fifteen to twenty feet up in a horizontal felled tree top, trying to figure out how to safely cut this tree apart with me up in it, figuring which way it might shift when I completed the cut, and what to do with the saw and me if it did. The third summer I had to figure how to cut the last remaining limbs in such a way as to lower the trunk down where I could cut it so that when I cut a 20-22" piece off the bottom of the remaining trunk it would fall into the lowboy, but not from so high that it would break the trailer's deck. The trunk was easily over three feet in diameter that far up the trunk, and each section I cut would have been heavy enough to do real damage if it fell too far. Had it fell on to the ground I would not have been able to man-handle it up on to the trailer by myself. That was fun engineering its dissection those three years. Yes, you can cut 3-3 1/2 foot diameter white oak with a 22" bar on an 028, but you better have experience cutting safely with the end of the saw, and best to have at least two wedges. And a few extra chains.

I was still in my 30's and I split those limbs and the 22-inch long trunk pieces by hand using a splitting maul, an axe and a maul. Even at that large diameter, once you got them to "crack" all the way across the final outcome was certain: hammer the axe deep to get a split to start running across, the back of the axe deep, past further possible contact by the maul, then go to work on that slim start of a split with the splitting maul. Once you got it to wedge in the axe's wood split, then get down on it with the maul, driving the splitting maul deep to run the split even farther, and pray that the crack ran all the way to both sides of that three foot trunk. If it did, then another 2-3 strokes of the maul on the splitting maul and they usually busted open. If it didn't? The Sword in the Stone situation! You outa' tools Podna! More than a few times I'd get the splitting maul impossibly wedged too tight for extraction, then re-hammer the now-free axe at the end of the running split to try to get it to finish the split, or free the splitting maul, only to get IT too far in there and also stuck. I'd walk away exhausted having hammered the splitting maul so far down into the crack that the back of it was an inch or two below the top surface of the trunk piece, and I was too tired to accurately "thread the needle" with the maul and get it down in the crack to hit the splitting maul any more. Abandon all hope: Give out and give up, come back fresh another day for another workout. Then, once it cracked to the edges and you mauled it until it busted in two, THEN (and only then) was it fun and easy, cleaving off a beautiful wedge every stroke of the axe. I'd get 25-40 wedges out of one piece of trunk that big, it was just a matter of how big you wanted them. White oak has to be the most beautiful wood grain down the side when split. Properly requisitioned that tree should have been fine furniture, not pallets or pulp wood.

I counted the rings on the trunk: 279 rings, before they got too small in the center to distinguish. That tree was there before the American Revolution. It grew less than 100 feet away from the fourth largest magnolia tree in Texas, confirmed and catalogued by people who track that kind of stuff. It is more than four feet in diameter. Thankfully magnolia does not have pulp wood value, so they left it.

 

Tree service dropped off 10 ton of free wood. My stihl saw is very happy. As for me jury still out there. Seriously though this is what really helps me , a kind of therapy!

 

Saturday I'm helping my friend clear more of her land. We're focusing on smaller stuff. She's rented a 6" chipper for the weekend and another friend of hers is bringing a saw. High temp for Saturday is forecast to be 8F.

 

I like dat!! Manageable logs!! I always seem to run into 20”plus logs that I cut in half so I can at lease move them

 

Better than going to the gym and something to show for it.

 

Yes sir BUT does get old after a while. I’m doing some bucking tomorrow on 25”-30” logs... I don’t wanna be there forever but cutting in half sure does sop up some time..... I’m helping a co-worker out with some ash trees I’m been collecting from a “free” supply found on Craigslist .