John, that Fireside_Friend looks to be indestructible. At my chopping block I have three old hatchets with wooden handles (mostly epoxied on) and I select the hatchet for the nature of the wood to be chunked/split. If the wood is really knotty/gnarled I just throw it into the pile to be converted into charcoal. I find myself using the lightest hatchet most of the time. It weighs 22 ounces. I use it to split Mesquite rounds that are cut 3 1/4" to 3 1/2" long so they will pack into a USPS medium flat rate box which holds 10 to 11 pounds of wood for BBQ and Smokers, which I peddle on Ebay for $1/lb. After Ebay and PayPal commissions I am left with about $7.50, which can then be used to buy wind power electricity and charge my electric car with enough kwh to cover about 300 miles, depending on how fast I drive. So, my package of wood takes me 300 miles! This morning was a sad day, as I had to bury my wood chopping assistant (a chicken) who stood patiently by the chopping block waiting for the yellow worms that invades the Mesquite sapwood (and even the heartwood). She could get her head in, and out, between strokes of the hatchet! (I split the wood small enough to insure that there are absolutely no yellow worms in any that gets packed into the USPS box.) Our long-haired male Dachshund did her in when I wasn’t looking…and I thought they were buddies. I get lots of scrap pieces of bark and worm-holed wood that is used in my TLUD stoves, or goes into the charcoal retort for conversion to charcoal and char. Here is a photo of my chicken taken last August.
Ray, today I was under the Dakota putting on a “new” muffler (from the old van) and I really missed my old dog who used to always join me under the trucks. I guess she counted it her territory and seemed happy to have me over, I never had a chicken for a friend.
I have lived in Texas. One year in Dallas (the suburb of Mesquite) and nine or ten years in El Paso where I really got into Mesquite. But not for the Bar BQ or the wood, but for the beans! I would harvest the beans all over the place, then process them in the bed rock morters left by the Indians. I’d eat the flour in pancakes mostly. But I also made a super candy of mesquite flour and honey. Ahhh, those were the days…
But then I ran away from home, got divorced, and ultimately became a woodgasser. The ultimate blast!
Last Thanksgiving I woodgassed over to my son’s place and chopped the heads off three turkeys. Makes your chicken friend look pretty brave.
Carl, the Fireside Friend SHOULD be on the material list. It makes chopping cookies about ten times faster than with a regular hatchet. You won’t believe it until you try it! It’s not just heavier, it’s built like a spliting maul and the wood can hardly resist its persuasion.
Hi All
Nothing beats having your own fuelwood supply right in your own back yard.
And yes. Those are actually saw log sections I am now cutting up. Put on the ground in the summer of 2008. Tired of waiting for local custom board market recovery. Plus I got old and tired. Bug food or fuel woods now.
REgards
Steve Unruh
Where is the list if you have wood available? I think I have a good source now. Spent all this weekend loading. hauling, sawing…
Here:
Thanks Chris
Hello all,
It has been said that our design gasifier does OK but need to have wood prepared just right vs. other designs.
I will agree the better the wood is prepared and sized the better any gasifier should perform.
I have been averaging using 75-100 pounds of wood per day with really no sorting. (Wife and son have been bagging)
Because I use sawmill edging and slabs a large percentage is bark but I don’t sort it out.
Picture and video below
Howdy y’all,
I just came back from a sunday afternoon walk with my wife around a little lake in our neighborhood (it takes approx. 1 hour to get around it…), as today might be one of the last summerish days around here.
On this stroll, I’ve seen enough dead wood to keep a woodgasser on the road for at least half a year…
Best regards, have a nice sunday afternoon, too!
Sam
Howdy Sam,
we are having some beautiful weather here in BC Canada but rain is supposed to come in tomorrow.We have friends here for the weekend and the kids have been helping me bag up the woodchunks that have been spread out and drying.
Our friend Yuka said her dad was telling her about life in Japan just after the war and told her that there were vehicles that ran on wood.She told him she has friends that drive one so we took a few pictures of her and her son on my truck and she has emailed them to him to see if it looks familiar.
I’m interested to hear back of any memories he may have of woodgas and charcoal.
Hey Wayne,
Thanks for the video! Don’t let Lisa and Tally find out you have been dumping their hard work back onto the trailer!
Yes Billy ,
I will hide the video from Lisa and Tally .
( keep looking for those serial numbers, one of these days you will find them) LOL !!
Not the most high tech approach to splitting but I like it.
Marvin
While cutting fire wood for the fire place, instead of throwing the limbs off to the side as discarded, I packed them on a hay wagon. Down at the house I ran them through my International tractor wheel chunker. I bag the chunks up in old gunny sacks. Then came the hard part. I tried to use binder twine to tie the sacks. I could NOT remember how we tied the feed bags. Spent way too much time on the net trying to find it. Finally, my wife, who always tell everyone she doesn’t know anything about computers, went on line and found how to tie a “miller’s knot” for me. If you are bagging your wood chunks, it is something you might want to know how to do.
Tom, that brings back memories! I used to go to the feed mill with my grandpa to get chicken feed, and I would watch the guy fill the feed sacks and push the slide gate just at the right time to fill the sack full enough but not too full. Then he would pull a piece of that soft brown twine which was cut in the proper length to tie the mouth of the sack, and with a couple of quick twists the knot was made! His first twist was over his thumb and around the sack and it seemed like his next move was pulling the ends to complete and tighten the knot, but there was more to it than that and my eyes could not keep up. I was about ten years old at the time and my grandpa would stand there with a twinkle in his eye back home while he watched me trying to duplicate the not. He went thru the depression and I remember he saved every piece of that twine in a pile up in the barn even though he didn’t have a clue what he would ever use them for.
We finally got some rain (over 4") and some wind. An old Oak tree has been dying for the last five years, finally blew over. The cows have been working on the leaves, and I need to cut up the larger pieces while it is still green. (Cuts much easier!) All of this tree will be used. The small branches and twigs and knots will go into the charcoal barrels. I don’t bother to tie up the bags because then you have to untie them! Good thing cooler weather is due sometime in November.
Thanks Don; The thumb part, I had forgotten and the internet didn’t say anything about it. I think that will make my knots much faster. My uncle had a flat rack truck so when we combined, everything got bagged. I held the bag under the spout until it was just about full then my uncle would take it while I got another bag. When the one was full he drug it up to the front of the rack and tied a piece of twine around the mouth. The miller’s knot is easy to untie when the time comes. No wonder I forgot how to tie a bag, that was 65 years ago. I was 8 or 9 and I drove the truck around to the combine when the hopper got full.
While fueling up this morning I took this short video.
If there are two of us one can hold the bags while the other shovels but the wife will usually have plenty bagged up ahead.
Each bag will be 13-15 pounds.
HWWT
Thanks Wayne
Great idea, I’m going to use it for all my sawdust that my mill produces.
At the moment I have 2 guys doing it, one holding the bag, the other filling.
I sleep my sheep on the saw dust for a week then spread it on the pastures, and lawn. It really irritates my dad, he has to mow the lawn twice a week because the grass grows so dam fast!
Thanks
Patrick
Got a new toy at Harbor Freight today. Under $15, and very compact. This little fellow is sure handy for checking gasifier wood.
I’m running a little time-crunch experiment to see how wet of wood I can run in the gasifier - a lot of this will be over 40%. “Dry” would normally be under 20%. So it’s not ideal, but we’ll see how it handles the extra moisture. So far so good!
