I’ve seen plenty of guys that could drop a tree like it was hooked up with a laser Mike. I was never one of them. If I wasn’t for cables and snatch blocks most of mine would be leaned into another tree even if it was the only other one around for a mile.
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Wow Mike. That’s a monster tree. With my 13" chainsaw bars I would be able to do no more than scratch the bark off.
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Michael,
My close neighborhood (next door and across the street) had 3-4 of those huge, ancient cottonwoods. I lived there from second grade to college age. In the late 1970’s they started coming down. Lightning, wind, old age, etc. were the cause. Finally, the homeowners said enough already, too many close calls, and they were removed one at at a time. Each tree was a large project with crazy arborists, ropes, large dump trucks, etc. People came from all around to watch the old grandfathers come down. You could see them on the skyline for miles away. The land was a family farm on the edge of a swamp, they were reclaiming the edges of the swamp to build new homes. It was a great place to grow up. I would see huge owls sitting up there at dusk. It would have taken about 6 kids arms stretched out to circle the trunks.
Some of the neighbor’s kids spent days making firewood to sell, but nobody wanted the cottonwoods. We did get tired of the sticky-bomb seed pods and the May snows, though. 
I see the swamps are still there, protected wetlands, no doubt! 
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I can’t knock the cottonwood. My 101 yr old house has some cottonwood framing and I will dare anyone of DOW to come and drive a nail in it by hand. But you can’t mess up the drywall.
A couple of guys around here have been exploring with the different grain directions and artistic “expression” of the wood and I am impressed. Just saying
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I thought cottonwood was the one that if it was infected with like a certain fungus, when the sap in the wood dries it crystallizes and the wood becomes rock hard.
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I wanted to show you guys the power of sawdust. With a lack of paper I start the Atmos boiler with sawdust. Normally it is like a thermal runaway, not for camera.
How nice would it be to run a gasifier on sawdust?
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It is a good candidate for a fluidized bed system. 
Otherwise, the other option is compressing it into pellets or briquettes. The fluidized bed system probably isn’t practical for small scale.
The other way is to microwave it. I don’t know if I ever posted that research paper or not.
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Compressing is beyond me, a no go. Maybe briquette but certainly no pellets.
It worked a little in the drizzler. With the moving ceramic balls I have good hope.
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If I look to thin blocks you feed into boiler, I am wondering why you need sawdust at all. If you stack bottom layer of sticks carefully, it must catch fire from propan torch easily through the bottom flame nozzle.
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Yes, it is. But with sawdust on top of those thin sticks I only light it for a few seconds and before the chamber is filled entirely, the exhaust temp is 200 C. In the video I had to wait a few minutes before I can walk away, normally it is filled up and finished. Tried the sawdust once when there was no paper around, now I dont want something else.
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I have thought about ways to build a saw dust reactor Joep. You would need to be able to pull a metered amount of saw dust out of a hopper with a vacuum. It would be a challenge to keep the air fuel ratio balanced. I don’t think you could get enough heat out of a packed pile of saw dust as it would mainly just burn off the surface and if the dust coming out of the hopper could present an explosion hazard. Admittedly I haven’t put a lot of thought into this.
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We design and build dust extraction systems for the wood industry.
Cant get the pictures ok from my phone.
Working like crazy, enjoying the wether. There are a lot of bolds and nuts in every installation and I think of the people i Ukraine with every single one.
So, I am standing in sawdust every day and aware of the risks. A few years ago I designed several bunkers for a client with a 200 kg/h briquette press. Works like a charm, the bridging problem was solved and that brought me here. Make some energy out of sawdust. It is coming, if the world as we now wont be distroyed.
Transport is best with augers, less energy needed.
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You could use an auger, and meter it into a blower, to make it work more like a blower type of oil furnaces. You would probably need a venturi type of thing to pull it, and a shaker type of grate to break up stuff that was too big or stuck together. You would probably start it on oil, then switch to sawdust.
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Joep, you have very uniform firewood. What kind of splitter do you use? 
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The land is full with fallen trees and I cant get to my firewood. No time for clearing. This is the spare stock.
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Look like bark is off. Your work or you get it in that way from forresters?
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I bring home pine branches to the sheep, who like the bark on the branches.
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Jan, I noticed you also have black ice in your driveway 
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When moving, I always reevaluate everything, what do I get rid of what do I want to move. This time around, a good chunk of my lumber pile got the knife. Pacific Northwest weather it is not easy to store lumber and not get dry rot, so I culled a truck load of lumber. It met the chunker tonight
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