Category:How-to
(Original posting by Eric Johnson)

Over the years I’ve learned that if you want to stack firewood to any decent height without it falling over, it’s best to build it up evenly along the entire length of the stack. I usually go up in 2-foot intervals. While I’m not the neatest wood stacker (or cutter) on the planet, I do get free-standing piles over 6 feet high that don’t fall down while they’re being built, or later.

To make sure I’m stacking straight between the posts, I run a piece of thin nylon string on the ground between the posts. If you make sure that the string is in the middle of the chunks when you put down the first layer, your pile will be straight.

This first shot is the first course of a 40-foot long pile of 24-inch (more or less) beech and hard maple. This wood was cut, hauled and split in the summer of 2005. I’ll be burning it this winter.

Here’s the stack with the second course in place. Note that I use 7-foot steel fenceposts secured with regular polypropelyne rope tied about two-thirds of the way up each post to hold everything together.

Here it is, capped off at 6.5 feet with the final course. Four cords nice and snug. The wood goes right on top of the poly rope. The weight tensions the rope, pulling the stakes tight against the pile, so the top third of the wood is holding the entire stack really tight together. If you tried to secure the rope without allowing the wood to tension it (say, by running 2×4s along the length of the pile), it wouldn’t work because the rope would stretch and the posts would spread out as you laid more wood on.

The first couple of years I tried this, I was afraid that the rope would snap, leaving me with bent posts and a sea of wood. But that’s never happened once in over 12 years of doing it this way. You have to replace the rope every few years (when it starts to powder), but it won’t break.

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• How-to