ibby458
08-29-2006, 06:47 AM
The neighbor has decided to sell her property (unfortunately, it's priced waaaaay out of my reach), but has agreed to sell me all the dead wood before the sale goes thru. It's mostly standing dead tamarack, whicj our outdoor wood furnace loves and makes the evaporator boil like crazy.
We came up with a cutting system that is quite efficient and I thought it might interest others.
My wife and son started into the woods from our back meadow, cutting a road and dropping every dead tree they found. THey kept going in random directions, heading for the bigger clumps of dead trees, dropping them whichever way they wanted to fall.
Once they got far enough ahead so I wasn't in the fall area, I'd back the tractor in and my younger sons would hook chains to as many as I thought the tractor could bring out in one hitch. Avoiding maples and other good trees, I'd skid the whole bundle out into the meadow, branches snapping off as it rolled and bounced along. The logs were almost always limb-less poles before I unhooked. 6 hours of this, and we'd have 5-10 (face) cords of bone dry wood in the field.
Each hitch was dragged over the limbs from the previous hitches, and the dry limbs were all broke into managable lengths. The next morning, I'd hook onto the wood traler before heading back, and we'd pick up a couple cords of 2-4" diameter dry limb wood, perfect for the evaporator. WE unhook the trailer off to one side and go back to skidding logs.
After 6 days of this, we have around 30 cords of logs in the field and 6 cords of dry limb wood piled up behgind the sugar house. I'll need to cut a lot of the sugar wood to length, but that'll be quick work compared to all the splitting required to work bigger chunks down to evaporator size.
We came up with a cutting system that is quite efficient and I thought it might interest others.
My wife and son started into the woods from our back meadow, cutting a road and dropping every dead tree they found. THey kept going in random directions, heading for the bigger clumps of dead trees, dropping them whichever way they wanted to fall.
Once they got far enough ahead so I wasn't in the fall area, I'd back the tractor in and my younger sons would hook chains to as many as I thought the tractor could bring out in one hitch. Avoiding maples and other good trees, I'd skid the whole bundle out into the meadow, branches snapping off as it rolled and bounced along. The logs were almost always limb-less poles before I unhooked. 6 hours of this, and we'd have 5-10 (face) cords of bone dry wood in the field.
Each hitch was dragged over the limbs from the previous hitches, and the dry limbs were all broke into managable lengths. The next morning, I'd hook onto the wood traler before heading back, and we'd pick up a couple cords of 2-4" diameter dry limb wood, perfect for the evaporator. WE unhook the trailer off to one side and go back to skidding logs.
After 6 days of this, we have around 30 cords of logs in the field and 6 cords of dry limb wood piled up behgind the sugar house. I'll need to cut a lot of the sugar wood to length, but that'll be quick work compared to all the splitting required to work bigger chunks down to evaporator size.