Your wood pile

Malpaso said:
My modest contribution. We only have a fireplace, no wood stove, so we only get a cord or so every summer.

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Is that oak and maple? Sure looks like it.
 
i like a nice neat stack but stacking is my least favorite step.
5 foot high tapered to down for runoff, 6 pallets stacked crisscrossed a 12x16 tarp fits great over this size pile. I screw the tarp right to the pile. Depending on how the stack comes out i might put a pallet on either end so water runs away from my pile.
Untitled by Ian Hockensmith, on Flickr
Untitled by Ian Hockensmith, on Flickr

Wood crib for odd cuts that don't stack well. Full of forms from a concrete job i have to burn.
Gonna build a new one next to my newer wood piles.
Untitled by Ian Hockensmith, on Flickr
new one in the making with some contents in waiting
Untitled by Ian Hockensmith, on Flickr

wood stacked on the porch, what a bad photo.
Untitled by Ian Hockensmith, on Flickr

and logs i arched out from a blow down site, a wood pile none the less, a nice neat wood pile in waiting...i feel i relate more to commercial now, dammit.
Untitled by Ian Hockensmith, on Flickr
 
I like your wheelbarrow David, looks really stable. I only have a single wheel one and depending on where the the bulk of the weight is distributed it can strain the left or right arm just holding it straight.
 
David Martin said:
We're enjoying the fruits of our labor. Glad we have enough so we can bring a load to the porch. It's been cold and we are going through it.
DM
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I had no idea you get snow in southern part of NM. I mean, I have seen snow when I was driving through Lincoln National Forest, but it was high altitude (around 8500 ft). Darn, I miss White Sands National Monument (such a cool place to spend a night among sand dunes)
 
KiwiBloke said:
I like your wheelbarrow David, looks really stable. I only have a single wheel one and depending on where the the bulk of the weight is distributed it can strain the left or right arm just holding it straight.
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I converted this one to a 2 wheel. It's amazing the difference it makes. All of a sudden 200 lb. loads are very stable. The tires are Solid, not
requiring air. So, I no longer have to deal with flats. DM
 
The logs aren't in the wood pile yet, but they're being prepped for traveling to it via an atv trailer and quad. By now, all of the logs but the large ones are on the landing shown in the first pic. For the large ones, I'll take the skidsteer down to them and choke or chain them out. I miss the old '56 D4 with a choker cable. No log or tree was too big for that dozer.
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Me at work moving logs to the landing for loading (or posing for the camera while doing that :rolleyes:).
 
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Twenty odd years ago when I lived in New Jersey, I heated my Concrete block Garage (20'x36'), but then again at the time I also derived around a third of my income from the sale of cured firewood, Suprisingly I was the only firewood seller in three counties that only sold split firewood that had been split and stacked more than a year earlier. I made the out of state contractor that cut down the dying shade trees in town a deal, where he did not have to transport felled trees 120miles out of state, I allowed him to dump logs locally on my private property, only requiring him to buck the trunks to 22" lengths, I employed a flock of teenagers to feed my two 30ton Log splitters and turn it into firewood and stack it in 1 cord stacks then I'd Date the stacks with laminated signs (plastic no trespassing signs mounted backwards, the plastic is made as a "Writeable surface" and can be stapled to the firewood) and all my wood was under cover! I did well enough at it I was able to PAY OFF a NEW 1989 F450 Dump truck in three years. unfortunately my business partner absconded with the assets when we were finally shut down by zoning officials.

I'm now 58 and don't have the energy for all that effort, and there aren't enough trees locally, so I burn coal.

And currently my coal bin is entirely full and has been since May, I still want to get another three tons in my uncle's dump trailer, sometime before the Snow flies!
 
The thing to note was most people believed the literature they got from the woodstove dealers, which was both good and bad, good when they believer that well cured wood was best, but bad when they insisted on Oak or Hickory (most of my customers burned in conventional fireplaces)Oak tends to be smoky, and hickory has to be burned in a fireplace to believe the volume and distance it throws sparks, but "some book" told them Oak and Hickory were the densest and best heat value.... I sold mostly Maple.

THE problem with Oak is the long curing time and the smell (or should I say STENCH?) while it dries.
That plus in an air tite stove if you attempt to regulate the burn by restricting the air feed, it smokes
like a Grateful Dead concert! and the Acrid smell of the smoke makes my eyes water from the memory! Hickory smoke is nice in moderation, but when burning it for heat is almost as bad, Maple Smoke OTOH... You keep looking for the syrup pan!
 
I have an air tight stove and burn exclusively red oak. I do, I must admit, have to babysit it. Once I get the coal bed sufficiently large enough that smoke is just what I'm looking for! I basically cook two medium sized pieces of oak at 550+ for an hour. Almost entirely secondary combustion with little primary combustion. I do have to keep an eye on it once or twice during that hour- hour and twenty.
I have paper birch and ash for this time of year. But when it gets cold give me some seasoned oak! I've got 2.5 chords well seasoned, put up n ready to go!
 
The main and almost unique heat wood here is oak.The acrid smoke comes from the tannin in huge amount in the oak. I'm retired now but still works with a friend who runs a small heat wood business as a secondary job. We let splitted oak logs in the rain (it rains a lot here) for years. We have less tannin but the drying isn't that good, the sapwood rots. Anyway the humidity level of the air is high, it's a rainy forest and we have hard time to get less than 25% of water in the wood whatever the curing conditions. This place is called "Little Siberia" for good reasons.
The other woods are beech, ash, birch and hornbeam. Beech and ash aren't that common, not enough to be a reliable source. Birch is an excellent wood when old enough (more than 25 years) to have a hard and dense heartwood. Unfortunately it doesn't happen often, typically birch colonizes the boggy terrains, drain them and immediately the oaks appear, grow up and make the birches wither away.
Hornbeam is an excellent wood may be the best in my stove, high density, no rotting, hot bed of coals but they are small trees and are hard for the tools.

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Dan.
 
Well, the two types of oak I had available to me were White Oak and Black Oak. Curing the black oak indoors made it seem like I was boiling a 55gal drum of urine! even outside for the first few months made your eyes water. But black oak was a joy to split, because freshly cut it was usually waterlogged and attempting to split it once it froze it would separate like "string cheese", just a tap with a 6lb maul and oh how the pieces would fly!!! I never got to put any on my big vertical splitter, I'd just split it all by hand when the temp was in the mid-teens. once it was quartered with the maul it was easy work with a 3lb axe. so long as you worked it when it was 20F or below. I bought my splitters to deal with the huge volume of maple I handled.
and as far as maple goes the smell of drying maple is one of the most pleasant smells I've discovered in life.
Oak smalls "pissy" to me and hickory is pleasant but the small has notes of crushed black pepper.

I only ever had ONE Ash tree, and that was one I cut down in my own back yard.

Birch burns so quickly it is hardly worth harvesting for firewood.

If I was offered an unlimited supply of any kind of firewood, I'd have to choose hard maple.
 
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