Working Weekend--Lumberjack Style!

Two weeks ago, Monkey1 spotted an advertisement in the local classifieds.    "Free firewood.  Must take it all.  First come, gets it all."  Well, not being one to turn down free firewood, we drove out that same evening to see how much there was, and whether we actually wanted it.  The wood was two loads worth in the truck, and not horribly rotted out, so we agreed to take it.  The landowner was prepping his home for sale, and we happened to spot that he had an hydraulic splitter in back.  Casual conversation ensued concerning said splitter, and it was found to be in pretty good running condition, starting up readily.  A price was negotiated, and a payment date agreed upon.

Meet my new Best Friend!

A Huskee hydraulic log splitter, either 22 or 22 ton, we're not sure which.  It could stand new wheel bearings, but the motor and ram are in fine condition, so the wheels can wait.

This weekend was planned to be a working weekend, splitting and cutting  and restacking our existing wood pile.  Much of what we had previously cut and split is too long for our new wood burning fireplace insert.  We are standardizing on 16" logs to make them more manageable in the insert.  This will be our heat source in the coming winter/cold seasons.

This was the initial pile to split.  I was going to run the splitter, with Monkeyboy managing the logs.  Once split, it would be carted over to the main storage pile and stacked neatly...something that needed done with the entire split pile if truth be told.

DH was going to run the chainsaw, shortening logs to 16".  This is his work area.  Monkey3 would be helping him.  Their working stack of logs is shown below (2nd picture).  The splits you see are ones that need to be cut down to 16", and possibly resplit to a more manageable size.

After about two hours running non stop, the pile of logs needing to be cut down looked like this.  We made quite a dent in it!

We also got quite a lot of it split and stacked.  You can see the change in the woodpile by comparing the two photos below.

Original woodpile.

The pile with the newly split wood added.

There remains quite a lot of work yet to do, but we did make a lot of progress today.  And, neither DH nor I feel like we got beat to death doing the work.  That alone makes the investment in the log splitter WELL worth the expense.  And to be honest, we paid less than 25% of the cost of a new one.  Some folks might call it "cheating", but I'd call it "working smarter!"