After a weekend of nightshifts and either snow or rain for weeks, it was finally ok weather for some fun. I have more important things to do, but I couldn’t resist some playing in my amusement park.
A rough guesstimation is that the pile of limbs below is about a year’s worth (or $2,000) of motor fuel.
Got wood
what kind of camera/phone are you using now to get such good pics and vids?
Hello Mr. Don.
I broke down and bought an I phone and am still trying to learn how to use it 
You may see me posting a lot of unnecessary pictures and videos as I am trying to figure this thing out .
Your videos and sound is great Wayne. Good monies spent, especially if you got the monies out of the wife’s hiding spot for your birthday that she didn’t you would look there. Well that’s your birthday gift for this year and the next and next…
Looking for good idea’s for how to dry chunked wood in winter time in michigan type CLIMATE’S. OR how long a basket of fully chunked green wood, would take to dry in about 70 f degrees sitting on a shelf in my heated wood burner room in my shop.? THANKS
Cold air, like the outside air during winter, can hold very little moisture. Even a small amount of water vapor will saturate cold air such that it can hold no more (100% humidity). That is a problem if you want something to dry out. The moisture in your green wood chunks can’t evaporate into the surrounding air because it is already “full” of water, at least while it is so cold.
Now… the trick is to heat that cold air up. If you do that its potential to hold water goes way up. And because it couldn’t hold much water before, you know the newly warmed up air has a lot of potential to absorb more.
So… how to warm up that air? What’s the goal? So… you don’t need “hot” air, even warming winter air to 50-70 degrees will give you good drying potential. Solar has an easy time making cold air less cold to lukewarm. Exhaust heat can work as well but while it is hot it’s generally pretty “wet” with absorbed moisture and may not have much more capacity to absorb more. You might need a heat exchanger to keep the cold air you are heating up from mixing with the hot exhaust.
You need to keep the warm dry air around your wood chunks and have some flow to the air was well. As the air dries out your chunks it will become cooler and saturated with water. That air needs to leave the wood chunk envelope and get vented so that new warm dry air can replace it.
Look at solar kilns / wood driers. A little OSB and plastic sheeting can get you a lot of dry wood. Virginia Tech has a design that’s good and cheap: Virginia Tech Solar Kiln | Sustainable Biomaterials | Virginia Tech
My chunks dries enough in a week, when i store them next to my boiler.
Wood always dries fast from the ends, in perfect weather about 1inch in 24hours.
After that inch has dried it goes MUCH slower, but thats no problem with our short chunks.
So true about cold dry air, everyone that tried hanging clothes from the clothesline in the winter has experienced this, as long they don’t freeze hard, they dries faster than in moist summer.
This is my wood dryer Kevin. Same climate. Maybe a little more humidity here close to the big lake. Of course it depends on how large the chunks are, but around inch and a half to two inches I can dry a 40 gallon load in a couple hours. That’s just a typical run time so it could be dry even earlier but I’ve never bothered to monitor it.
I have all the wood put up for our house, sugar shack and the kid’s cabins. Now I need firewood for the garage. Because it’s so late, I’m choosing birch for firewood. I had a guy drop off 6 cord of logs. 3 cord of birch and 3 cord of maple. Birch tends to have less moisture content when harvested in the winter therefor burns better when it’s not seasoned. I found that out the first winter we move here. I will split these up a little smaller to burn better.
Last winter I bought this log splitter for the skid steer for this reason. I cut the logs down to 2’ long and then yse this 6 way splitter. The split logs won’t be small enough, so I split them again with my smaller splitter.
I felt like trolling osha in a video 
I thought y’all might get a chuckle out of this photo. A friend close by offered me some wood from several trees he had cut down. I cut it up with a DOW member recommended Greenworks chainsaw, split it with a maul and wedges, and hauled it home in my modified Honda Fit. This will supplement what I already have to get me through this winter. I only use about a cord of firewood a year. I usually buy wood, cut, split, and delivered.
Skidding Birch up to the landing for the H to take it the rest of the way.
I have a list of faults…no muffler, too much water in the hydraulic oil, loose tracks, loose brake bands, and it burns engine oil. Yet, I was perfectly happy to let the old machine idle through the swamp and do a good job. Sometimes, slow and steady keeps you from getting muddy, putting your tracks back on.
I have never seen the sunset on the solstice before.
Why am I not dead?
I’ve been watching youtubes about tree felling and bucking while I’m doing more chair warming in the winter and I’ve learned that I’ve never done it right. 30 years I’ve been steadily working my woodlot and prior to that I have cleared a few building sites. I’m not much of a lumberjack and more often than not I hang a felled tree into a standing one. Easier now that I have so much more clear space thanks to the Ash Borer. Still, a lot of my firewood trees are windfall and very few ever hit the ground. I don’t know how many more years I’ll be able to do the work but thanks to the Finnish Lumberjack, Buckin Billy Ray, Guilty of Treeson and many others I’ll be doing it smarter and better.
I know the feeling, YouTube helps me alot also.
The only right way is to ‘don’t hurt yourself’ 
I actually have seen plenty of videos with misinformation in them. I am not saying that is what you are watching, but just take what you watch with a grain of salt.
No doubt that a lot of youtube is bullshit Sean. Still, it’s pretty hard to fake a tree fall. I have never done a bore cut and never heard of a sizwell notch. At least 60 per cent of the time I’m going to pinch my bar and have to use the back up saw and hope I don’t screw up the trapped saw somehow. Bent a few bars as well. Main reason I get a tree down is I have a hundred foot length of steel elevator cable and a few 50 footers. Plenty of snatch blocks and chokers. Logging chains. I do wrap a chain above the face cut on anything I think could barber chair. Probably the only smart thing I have done other than carry a change of underwear because some of these trees scare the shit out of me.
I hate wasting anything but these saw mill slabs are getting in my way and I can’t think of a use for them. 
Oef, that is a month or more heating our house.
