Another Gifted Tree

 A year and a half ago, someone took down a red oak and gave it to me.  Someone just a couple of weeks ago had a dead oak of some kind near his house, cut it down, and invited me to haul it off.  He cut it into max 6.5-foot lengths.

That enabled them to fit in the bed of the truck with the tailgate closed.  The tree was fairly small, so it fit easily into my log rack for bucking--and the individual segments were easy to handle even before cutting.

Bucking them only took 30 minutes or so.

It was described as being "dead but not rotten," and that looked pretty correct as I was bucking it.  But it's definitely not ready to throw in the stove next month. As I started to split it, some sections had the feel and smell of fresh oak, and the moisture meter gave readings of around 24% (though some were higher).  That's similar to the freshly cut (as of July) maple that I also have. Maybe by early 2023 some will be ready (if needed).

Stove Season is Here

 My last fire in the wood stove last spring was about the third week of April, though I didn't use it daily past early March.  That was substantially later (by about six weeks) than previous years.  Similarly, the stove season this fall is kicking off a little earlier than in the past.  Previously I haven't used the stove before the first week of November, but a week early, it was easy to see that things were heading in the direction of cooler weather.

I have a soapstone stove:

Allegedly, the soapstone is denser than firebrick and provides a flatter heat curve--the stove top won't get as hot, but it will stay warm longer.  Now that I am starting my third year with it, I'm not sure it offers much advantage--though it is true that it doesn't get as hot as a basic cast iron or steel stove with firebrick. My stove top temperature usually runs about 350, and I don't think it has ever been above about 450.  Nonetheless, when the chimney has been swept, it has been clean.  And as can be seen in the picture above, it's burning pretty clean, too.  The interior might get sooted up at some point with every burn, but then it always clears away.  Soapstone is at least more attractive than firebrick.

One of its idiosyncrasies is that the manual recommends at least one break-in fire, with just a few relatively small sticks, to gently heat the soapstone and help purge any moisture that may have accumulated in the off season.  So I did that this last week, with two relatively small burns on successive days.

They put out a little heat, but not much, and the stove top got to around 100-110, which is the target ("warm, not hot").  I didn't keep feeding them, and both died down fairly quickly.  The house was in the mid-70s at the time, so I didn't really need heat.  The first real fire came a couple of days later, when the house was lingering in the upper 60s, slowly drifting down, with a series of cool cloudy days that offered no prospect for solar warming.

It's wood-burning time again.

Splitting Next Year's (or Later) Wood

 Very generous friends dropped a red oak tree last week and gave me the wood.  It was medium-sized.  It fit (barely) in the bed of the truck.

The relatively small branches I set aside for the moment, and started on the larger sections of the trunk.  Although fresh, it split relatively well, with exceptions.  I have had problems with some varieties of oak when newly-felled.  These pieces tore in places, and some were very hard to fully separate, but over the course of about three hours, I got it all done.  Some I stacked on a pallet:

And some I put on a linear rack under cover.

In the picture above, the new wood is to the left; on the right of the rack is an eclectic mix of maple, poplar, and red oak mostly cut down in 2020.

The two pictures show about two-thirds of the wood from the truck bed. In terms of volume, the truck bed holds about 52 cubic feet; a cord is 128 cubic feet.  When split, the 52 cubic feet would expand somewhat, but it is still probably only about a half cord.  More will be needed for a season's heating, but this is a nice and welcome start.

Some say that oak needs to season for much longer than part of a year: November is only eight months away.  I have burned oak that seasoned for about eight months, and more that has been older.  The longest recommended interval I have found online is three years (here and other places). Many sites suggest two years.  Most sites agree at least that it seasons quicker when split.

I have other wood to burn before this, but will most likely begin burning it sometime next winter.

Dealing with Large-Diameter Wood

 I'm definitely not very accomplished when it comes to firewood splitting.  However, I have managed to develop some methods to deal with difficult wood.  One thing that's challenging is large-diameter logs.  Because splitting goes with the grain, if the piece being split is too large, the resulting wedge-shaped pieces will be too big to fit in the stove.

I had a large oak tree cut down a couple of years ago.  While I did split some smaller pieces, the main trunk was huge--three feet in diameter at the base.  I was a little nonplussed about how to proceed.  I wasn't sure I could split it myself.  Meanwhile, it sat in the yard decaying.

I finally decided to give it a try, and was able to make the first split with the maul pretty easily.

From there it was likewise not too difficult to get it into larger chunks, which then could be split into smaller pieces.

However, the wedges were, as noted previously, too large.  I was able to break them into two pieces across the grain using the wedge, but it was pretty tough work.

 

 

I eventually hauled much of it up to the electric splitter, and found it was able to split these relatively small pieces easily (they were only 10 inches long).  Bigger pieces might be a problem; as the pictures show, I have a lot of sections that are longer, up to 18 inches.

One thing I was pleasantly surprised by was the overall condition of the wood--it's still in relatively good shape, but I know the clock is ticking.  There are definite signs of insect infestation. They're returning to dust pretty quickly at this point.  This is probably the last good opportunity to harvest relatively unblemished wood. 

Sweetgum and Eggs

 I've related my difficulties with splitting sweetgum a number of times previously.  While relatively small pieces (up to six inches or so) splits fine, larger pieces are a nightmare.  The wood doesn't have a straight grain.

Yesterday I was splitting what I thought was some oak cut last year about this time.  It was hard to split when fresh, so I stacked it for a while.  Wood that I'm splitting now is for next fall.  I grabbed a piece that was about 10-12 inches in diameter and put it on the splitter.  The splitter was able to split it once, whereupon I saw that it was sweetgum.  I tried to quarter one of the halves and the splitter choked.  I then grabbed my maul and wedge.  I manged to get it into quarters but it took a lot of work.  You can see the blue streak on the wedge as it dug erratically through the piece.

It looks like a straight-grained tree that was twisted by some malevolent force as it grew.  I'm still amazed that there's wood rated worse for splitting than sweetgum (sycamore and elm, according to the University of Kentucky site).

In other news, the chickens are steadily, if slowly, laying eggs. I may have up to three laying now, and I'm getting one per day most days.  They seem to be using the nesting box on the ground inside the tractor consistently now.  The lighter-colored eggs below are from my birds, while the darker ones are from Costco.

The Miracle of Bark

My wood stove setup is not the greatest.  The stove itself is nice: it's a Hearthstone Shelburne and can keep my 1400 square foot house reasonably warm in Georgia.  As the picture in this post shows, the chimney is not very tall.  It's about 12 feet at best.  It's apparent that it doesn't draw strongly.  Once the fire is roaring, it draws in enough air and burns well.

Sometimes when it doesn't seem to getting off to a very fast start, I throw in some bark.  Much of my firewood is oak, and the bark usually detaches as it dries.  A lot of hardwoods are that way.  It burns extremely well.  It very reliably improves the burn.

 In the picture above, the intensely burning area is a few small slabs of bark, with a sweetgum log on top.

This is a closer view.  Oak bark does not burn for long, but it's not a flash in the pan.  It burns long enough to get split wood (or an unsplit small piece) burning aggressively.  Throwing several sheets of bark into the stove at once heats the stove up to about 400 fairly readily (stove top temperature).  Although 400 might seem low, the max is about 600 and soapstone stoves seldom get above about 350-400).

Bark also functions well as kindling.

All of this may sound counter-intuitive, and some people dismiss it as being useful, because bark resists flame.  This is definitely true for small pieces that I throw into the stove with bark intact: the fire has to be going somewhat well for that to work.  It takes a few minutes to burn through the bark and get to the wood underneath.  However, when off the original wood (split or otherwise), the bark by itself does burn well.  Contrary to what a lot of people have indicated, I haven't noticed that it leaves more ash. It may...but I never use enough for that to be apparent.  I have never fed a fire nothing but bark, although I have enough of it that it could be done.

Oaks have good bark and some other hardwoods do.  Wood like cherry and peach has very little usable bark, but it burns okay, too; it's just paper-thin.  Southern pines don't have too much bark to them, and it often doesn't seem to separate, but western pines sometimes do: ponderosa pines can have very thick bark, and very old douglas firs can have bark up to 14 inches thick (though trees of that size aren't likely to be often used for firewood).

Bark works.  It's a reliable go-to.

Dealing with Pines, Continued

Last summer I posted about removing a bunch of volunteer pines. It was hot sweaty work on a black flag day.  Later in the summer I cut a bunch more.

To my dismay, I saw that some (not all) of the pines have coppiced, i.e., they've sent out sprouts around the former main stem.  They're down but they're not out.  Glyphosate may be called for once things start growing again in the spring.

The biggest of the trees I cut down last summer were about two inches in diameter.    Shown below is one of the bigger stems.

This size is easily manageable with loppers.  When pines are neglected for a longer period of time, it's a different story.

I have some pines that, unnoticed by me, have grown up too close to a pole barn and they are now threatening the structure (or actually damaging it).  They have been growing on the back side for the most part.  In the years since I've had the property, they have grown to something twenty feet tall and up to eight or nine inches at the base.  These trees are more like 14-16 years old.

Felling them has not been too difficult so far, but things are crowded in the area where they are growing, so some have to be dropped and removed to make room to cut down others.  They were big enough that I wanted to buck them into firewood-length pieces as I hauled them out.

 Once they were on the ground, I used the Stihl chainsaw and timber jack to part them out.

You can see that the one growing closest to the back of the pole barn was so close I had to cut it off a couple of feet up from the ground.  At the base there wasn't enough room to get the chainsaw bar behind it. You can also see that the needles still look green and reasonably fresh--even though this picture was taken a couple of months after the tree was cut down.

Once the main stems were cut into 18-inch pieces, I hauled them out in a wheelbarrow.

The work is still ongoing.  I plan to split them into firewood; although pine is not highly valued in the east compared to hardwood, it has some value.  As previously noted, I also have a lot of tulip poplar on deck for next winter.  It is not much higher on the BTU-per-cord chart than pine (and may even be lower; some sites indicate that southern pine yields over 20 million BTUs per cord, which approaches 80-90% of what oak provides).  Some suggest that pine causes heavy creosote deposits--the rounds above exuded drops of sticky sap along all of the ring lines soon after cutting--but if seasoned and used in a hot fire, it can burn as cleanly as anything else.

More on Splitting Wood

I'm still having trouble with the sweetgum.  Some of those pieces just won't give up.  I have tried again with my manual splitter to no avail, and also got a heavy-duty wedge and tried pounding it in.

As you can see, the results were less than satisfactory. After taking the picture I pounded it farther in, and eventually had to use the sledge side of the maul to pound it back out after it failed to achieve the desired results.  For now, the piece remains unsplit. According to this site, it yields about 21 million BTU per cord, versus around 26 for oak.  That's certainly decent.  I do question the page's splitting rating of 'fair', however.  Or rather, if sweetgum is fair, I don't want to deal with elm or sycamore, the two species rated 'poor'.

I next put it back on the electric splitter to see if I might have weakened it enough to split it.  I did get it into two pieces (you can see the blue paint marks left by the wedge in the picture below) and I got one stove-sized piece to spall off, plus a few smaller kindling-sized chunks.  But as the picture also shows, it's not straight-grained.  It is splitting in a swirling pattern. 

A different site suggests splitting sweetgum when it is freshly-cut.  I did have that opportunity (although I didn't have the Boss splitter back when I first got it) but I didn't try.  So it's definitely well-seasoned now (although mostly gone, except for a few remaining large-diameter pieces).  To finish it off, I may see if I can find someone with a gas-powered 20-ton+ splitter.

I'd still take more sweetgum if offered to me, preferably about six inches in diameter or less.  That size both of my splitters can handle.  I'm not sure I'd jump too fast on sweetgum that was much larger than that.

On the other side of the splitting-ease scale is tulip poplar (listed in the chart as good).  My friend offered me some newly-felled poplar and I jumped on it.  I would've let it season before splitting, but he suggested I try it while still green (within a couple of days of being cut).  The results were surprising (to me).  It split pretty easily.  The small pieces more or less fell apart when I used the electric splitter on them, and even the larger-diameter pieces broke apart easily--but the larger chunks were pretty stringy.

The tulip poplar is lighter in weight and lighter in BTU content (17, only about 65% as much as oak--this is more like pine, which I also have some of waiting to be split). These factors probably mean that it will burn pretty fast, as the University of Kentucky site suggests. The small amount of pine I have burned so far has gone pretty quickly, but I do not have any experience with poplar or willow, two of the non-pine species that yield comparatively little heat per volume when burned.

In a relatively short amount of time I was able to split almost an entire pickup truck bed load. The stringy pieces were more time-consuming to split, but the split wood now has integral kindling.

I have never (as far as I am aware) split any of the woods listed as 'excellent' (black walnut, ash, and hemlock).  I do have some black walnut tree trimmings to cut to stove length, but they are small-diameter so won't need to be split. 

In the picture of the larger stack, the stringiness can be seen in some of the pieces.

Oak splits well when dry, but I also have some of that from a freshly-felled tree.  It's as stringy as the large-diameter poplar and not the easiest to split when wet.

More on Splitting Wood

...And more on sweetgum.

As I just described, I got an electric wood splitter to help improve my productivity when splitting.  For the most part, it has worked okay.  So far, I have mostly used it with a bunch of sweetgum I got from my landscaping friend.

Yesterday, I had a piece that the electric splitter choked on.  I moved it over to the manual 10-ton and that choked, too.  After a few tries, this is what the log looked like:

As you can see, the wedges on the two splitters didn't make much headway.  The wood seemed to have a spiral grain that resisted splitting.  I hauled out one of my mauls to see what I could do.

After a couple of tries, I split off a piece.  However, I also did something that I have been aware of is a risk when splitting manually.  It's a best practice to bring the maul straight down onto the wood being split, so that if it misses or glances off, it is less likely to impact body parts.  Swinging in an arc could be bad.

Below is my left boot.  When splitting off the piece, on one swing the maul went to the ground, hitting the boot on the way.  I use steel- or composite-toe boots when splitting to provide some protection, although injury would still be possible.  The visible cut is deeper than it looks; it was taken after I used some adhesive to close the wound. I don't think I would've hit a toe if the composite hadn't been there, but I can't rule it out.  Cleaving off a toe with the maul would not be good.

Splitting Wood

I'm not an expert at this--at all.  However, expert or not, I needed to start splitting some wood fast when I moved last year (at the end of November, into a house with no central heat). I had two pieces of equipment when I moved in: a manually-operated 10-ton splitter like this one, and an 8-pound maul.  I also had the rack of oak logs that had been cut the year before.  Splitting with the maul was a mixed bag.  Some pieces readily split, but others only gave up after an extended battle.  Eventually, I started pre-splitting the larger pieces with the 10-ton splitter, then finishing them with the maul.  The 10-ton seldom split the wood completely; its range of motion was limited.

That worked relatively well, although it was slow. I have since gotten a second maul, as well. When it comes to using the wood to generate heat, problem #2 was that the winter was very wet, with  heavy rain December-March.  The wood was fairly wet; I wasn't covering it very well initially.  Problem #3 is that the chimney, visible in this post, is pretty short.  It doesn't necessarily draft that well.

However, manual wood splitting was viable, if slow. I learned that if there were a lot of branches coming off the piece I was splitting, it disrupted the grain and splitting was harder.  Also, some types of wood split more easily.  I have a friend in the landscaping business who soon supplemented my wood supply with a lot of mixed pieces, but he warned that some was sweetgum, which has a reputation for not splitting well.

Some sweetgum pieces split easily, but others were fibrous and stringy, requiring a lot of effort to separate.

 

 

This spring, I had to have an oak tree taken down; it was dying and right next to the garage, and also within falling distance of the power lines and house.  The big parts (large branches and main trunk) were left by the loggers.  Some of those are as much as three feet in diameter; they'll have to be chainsawed (either cut with the grain or across) before splitting in any fashion.

So I have plenty of wood on the property at the moment, but was interested in speeding the splitting process up a bit.  One option was (and still is) to rent a towed gas-powered splitter; they are readily available from independents and places like Home Depot.  A quick check showed that a 24-hour rental was about $100. Another option is / was buying a splitter.  In addition to gas splitters, there are electric ones, as well, ranging from 4-10 tons.  Gas-powered ones are typically in the 20-30 ton range.  So electric ones have their limits and are relatively weak compared to those that are gasoline-fueled.  There are YouTube videos of people splitting very large logs with 5-ton electric units, but the specifications for electric splitters typically say up to 10"-12" depending on motor and hydraulic ram size.

Cost is a factor.  Gas-powered ones are generally $1300+, while electric ones are roughly $250-$850; most are in the $200-$400 range.  Ones like the manually-operated splitter mentioned above generally cost around $120-$150 but are frequently on sale for $100 or so.

I decided to give an electric one a try and settled on a 7-ton model.

 

So far, it seems to be working okay.  it's definitely slow compared to a gas model (my one experience with those came a long time ago with a friend whose father used one to split a mountain of cottonwood in an hour).  However, the wheelbarrow load shown below took about 10 minutes, which isn't bad.

There are some small-diameter sawed pine pieces at the top right; those came from a dead pine branch that fell into the driveway.  The rest is mostly sweetgum with some hickory.

So far I haven't used it on anything bigger than the 10" recommended, but it is handling that size well.  I do have some wood to split that is larger.  Shown below is more sweetgum. Even though the sweetgum mostly showed the same characteristics described above, the wedge forces enough of a split to make it easy to separate the pieces.

As long as it doesn't break, it'll be very helpful.  It's substantially better than my previous approach.