Whacking Wood

One of the weekly chores around here is to bring the weeks wood supply in from the outside to an inside holding area closer to the downstairs RSF furnace. We make good use of a small electric wood splitter mounted waist high to quickly split the rounds into manageable chunks. The RSF wood furnace can take logs almost three feet long, but if they are 18" in diameter they are just to heavy to handle easily. One of those in and we are ofton turning on the "air conditioning" ( i.e. opening the doors) or dancing on the veranda in our ginch. Which is O.K. on a night like last night with a full moon, a warm wind, and +2C. Not so nice when it's in the -30's with a screamer Easterly.

The bigger rounds require splitting. My favorite tools for this is a pickaroon and an eight pound splitting maul. If it can't be powered through the wood a couple of whacks with a small sledge and the toughest limbed wood comes apart. I find splitting wood a great form of meditation by sweating. I use two main poses:

The lift:

The follow through:

Repeat until satisfied.

Another problem we've run into is that the new/old upstairs heater we installed uses wood that can only be 16 inches long to fit in the door. So we essentially have to make two lengths of wood. This season we will standardize and everything will be 16 inch lengths and I will split the wood finer for the upstairs. We are trying to time it so that all the wood we have is burnt by the time we do another cutting. We have about 30 acres of bone dry bug wood before we have to look elsewhere and I figure that will last at least 20 years or more.

Here's Xena, bringing our attention to a moose she saw in the East tree line:

She's a good watch dog. Normally she does not use binoculars. She can even see the invisible moose. Which is quite a talent.

Comments

Carol Browne said…
Ha! Xena! Good work with the binocs! LOLS!
Anonymous said…
Wood Splitters are the way to go. I wish I would have go one years ago. My back loves me now a days!

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