Monday, July 22, 2013

Looking ahead to winter

Despite stifling temperatures these past couple weeks we knew we needed to turn the log pile into a stacked wood pile. The logs had been aging (very unattractively) next to the porch for about six months. That's good but they won't fully dry until they've been split and appropriately stacked. Leave them like this too long and you run the risk of them getting punky (that's a technical term) and rotten.

Logs!
So we rented a hydraulic log splitter and got to work.

Oooh, hydraulics
We got the splitter for 4 hours and spent every bit of it lifting, splitting, and throwing the wood into a big pile. 
Steady progress
A big pile of wood that's been sitting out for six months attracts lots of really creepy stuff. Ants, spiders, and one really cool snake skin (no sign of the actual snake).

I want hazard pay for this
Ta dah!
We didn't quite get done before Chris had to return the splitter. But the leftovers were fairly small and he made quick work of them with the manual splitter, i.e. the maul.
Leftovers
We stacked it all up and figure we ended up with 3+ full cord of wood. Pretty good. We wanted to put away at least 4 cord for this winter's use and we still have a bunch of trees down and drying that need to be bucked for the fall splitting session.  By the time we're done we'll easily have six cord split and stacked which gives us a nice margin of error plus gets next season's wood drying in advance.

Unfortunately there was a stack casualty when we got up the next morning. Looks like something tried to climb the pile and it tipped over. Argh. Hate re-doing work.

Who climbed the wood pile?!?
On the other hand, when the day starts this beautifully it takes quite a while to even notice any damage.

Just gorgeous

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