Weekend Worker Bee a Success

A couple neighbors on the block donated some wood for the pile. One even delivered via dump truck right on the front lawn. What type of wood do you folks think this is? I was told Silver Maple, but I'm not sure. Update: The wood is White Poplar.


Anyhow, you can't complain much about any type of wood that is delivered for free to your front door. It's all BTUs, right? Here are some pics of the loads. I bucked them where they lay, and moved them via trailer to the back yard splitting area.








Here are the girls that took care of business bucking up all the logs. I can't complain about either saw. Both get down to business and get the work done. I'll have to say that I am especially fond of the 261C. The M-Tronic technology makes the saw a pleasure to run. Very snappy and powerful. The 362 is just pure grunt force. It likes to eat wood. Both saws could oil the bar more for my tastes however.


Another neighbor let me have a nice trailer full of Locust. I unloaded it all in the back yard. I figured that I may as well rent a splitter for the weekend. I could pay the day rate of $71 to keep the splitter from mid day Saturday, and bring it back Monday morning. Not a bad deal. Also, my mother and father in law pitched in, so the work went smoothly, and we all had a great time.




I kept a little round on the lever side of the splitter to stick my hatchet in. This wood was very stringy, and the hatchet did duty cutting all of the strings so I could separate the splits.


On the other side of the splitter, I stacked two rounds up to the level of the splitters working area to act as a type of table to lay the slabs of rounds on while we split the other large chunks. This method worked very well. I'll make sure to do this in the future.


Well, after about 8 or 9 hours over the weekend, the final result is large piles of split wood. We were very happy to be done with it all. I felt like King of the Mountain!


A nice pile of Locust. The only hardwood I have in fact. Come the winter of 2016, we should be sitting sweet with some nice long burning wood.


What a great weekend. Lots of good honest work. Great weather. And great time spent with family.


Thanks Aaberg's Rentals, and thank you Mr. Power Pro 22 tone splitter! I believe that you and I shall meet again.

Thanks for the info, gents! I just googled White Poplar and it looks like that's right on the money. The wood I have has the same leaf and bark. I have a lot of it now, so I guess it will be good for the shoulder seasons.

Blacktail, I see that you are in Western, WA as well. I live in Tacoma, WA. I have always read about the guys that get locust, and all of the other great hard woods. Given where we live at I figured that I wouldn't ever get any really good hard wood, but when I looked up the species of the tree that the neighbor gave me, it is in fact Black Locust. Once I learned what it looks like, I began to spot it all over the place around where I live believe it or not. One place where it is growing like mad is the insides of the clover leaf loops to hop on I5 near my house. There is also a nice grove of it just down the street from me. I'll certainly keep an eye out for it in the future. We also recently camped in Eastern, WA, and there is a tone of Honey Locust over there. Go figure.

Shawn Curry said:

Is the Black Locust pictured here at all? I see one small split - right at the end of the bar of your 261, that looks a little bit like the bark, but none of the stuff I can see in your other photos is BL. It is planted as an ornamental well outside of it's range, so it's possible. It has a distinct heartwood with an orange-ish color, with very small ring of cream-colored sapwood.

Around here, it's easiest to spot standing trees in early June, when it sprouts large, showy, drooping clusters of small white flowers. The leaves are oval shaped, very small (usually 1" across or less), and in a compound arrangement: one at the tip, and as many as 20 in opposite pairs on a single stalk.

It can be hard to tell the difference without seeing leaves. I originally thought the largest tree on my property was BL; turned out to be Trembling Aspen when I could finally see the leaves.

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This whole pile (pictured in the original post) is locust as far as I could tell.


You can also see a number of Locust limbs that the 362 is sitting on. It's hard, heavy stuff. I think that it smells like a jar of green olives with pimento.

Here are some more detailed pics of the wood and leaves. The tree had thorns as well.






I suppose that it's crazy that it is growing so plentifully over here, but I'm 99.8% positive that it's Black Locust based on my research. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The holzhausen's are a lot of fun to make and look at. All this freshly split wood will go into a new one for the 2016 burning season.

I started the new holtzi this evening. First I used some bricks, sticks, and a little bit of sweat to grade and level the wood pallets. I made a conscious decision to use wood pallets for this stack due to other forum members commenting that the plastic pallets wouldn't allow the stacks to breathe as well as they should in a past thread. This made sense to me, so wood it is. One thing that I'm a little unsure about at this point is weather or not the pallets are supported enough by the existing bricks for the massive weight that they will have to hold for some years to come. Once I get the stack going, I'll look for any sag. If I see any, I'll add some intermediary support between the existing bricks. These wood pallets make a square that is probably about 18" x 18" bigger footprint than the plastic pallets. This holtzi is going to be considerably larger than the other two, and will contain a LOT of wood.

Here are the pallets more or less leveled on the grade. The low side sits about a foot higher from the ground than the high side. This will create a little bit of a challenge once the pile gets five feet high or so, but that's what five gallon buckets are for, or a ladder in a pinch.


Now that the pallets are all set in place, we create our ring of splits set end to end to make a circle. After this, we lay the nice long splits around the outside while throwing the shorts, chunks, and uglies into the center. Simple as that. I have a good size pile of Black Locust that I'll stack on the bottom due to its longer drying time. Once I've stacked up all the Locust, I'll finish up with the popple that we just split.


I'll take pics of the progress and post it in this thread as the stack grows.

Also, I picked up one of the General Tool moisture meters from Lowes today so that I could check some of the splits that have been stacked since January of this year. The wood is fir, alder, and cedar. I pulled some good sized splits of each from different places in the pile, split them in half and measured in the middle of the splits with the prongs of the meter going with the grain. Everything was under 20%. Most around 16% or so. Awesome!!

A few more pics of the holtzi stacking progress. Man those things hold a lot of wood.





You can place 2x4s, or long poles into the stack to tie it together. I usually use a couple of 2x4s crisscrossed.


The pile is just about tall enough to start thinking about stacking up the roof portion. You'll notice that there is chicken wire wrapped around the holtzi. The chicken wire is wrapped almost all the way around the stack with poles interwoven at then ends of the wire so that the wire holds its shape. The two ends of the chicken wire meet with about 6" - 8" between then ends. I use zip ties to tightly snug the wire around the stack helping to stabilize the stack making it a bit safer for the kiddos and just people in general to be around, especially for a stack of this size. This technique has worked very well for me in past holzhausens.


The mountain of splits is almost gone, so I'm almost finished again with stacking for a while which is a good thing in the heat we have been having lately.

You are very welcome. If you are up on the two or three year plan and you've never tried a holtzi, try one out. The hausens that I have made hold between 2.5, and 2.75 cord of wood each. They hold a lot more wood than you think. And yes, if you give the wood a proper curing time, ie 1 year for softer woods, and 16 months to three years for hard woods, the center dries out just fine. All of the wood in my other two holtzies right now is between 15% - 17%. The stacks also look great and are fun to build. The kiddos love to get in on the action and are very useful collecting the chunks and uglies in their wagon, then tossing them in the middle of the stack. Give it a shot. Take your time the first time around and I'm sure you'll love it. The neighbors will love it too.

Auzzie Gumtree said:

just need the roof plans now.........

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Hey Auzzie! The roof stacking is a little different than the regular stacking on the holz, but it's still easy. On top of the last layer that you can see in my last pic, I'll stack the next course with the splits overhanging the side of the hausen a couple of inches. From there you just keep tossing chunks and uglies into the center with each course of splits laid around the top of the stack further towards the middle. You'll eventually reach the middle with your long splits which will create the peak. Doing it this way creates an overlapped shingle effect, and really does work to prevent most of the stack from getting wet from rain. Take a look at the roof of the stack below for more of a visual of how it works.

adrpga498 said:

NIce work, Did you ever try stacking vertical in the center? I stack 2splits high vertically in the center before I just toss in. Helps with air flow.

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I never have stacked vertically in the center because I generally only toss chunks, shorties, and uglies in the center of the stack. They don't tend to stack vertically very well. All of my centers have seasoned well in the past doing it this way, so the airflow must be sufficient.

On Thursday I returned home from work to find quite a crew taking down the big Walnut tree right next door. I'm sad that the tree is gone because it was a beautiful tree that provided tons of walnuts, but the crew threw a bunch of wood over the fence into my yard, so I can't complain too much.

The crew hard at work. The guy climbing the tree was interesting to watch. Their little Stihl arborist saws are quite impressive and seem very powerful. I'll have to point out that the whole crew was using Stihls. They ran a 660 that was a beast.


I promptly pulled out the 261c and went to work bucking the logs. After bucking, I split the rounds and found that I had just enough wood to finish the monster holtzi that we have been working on for a few days.


Finally the monster holtz is finished, and I'm happy about that, because it's too hot, and I'm tired of stacking wood for a while. The stack measures 8 feet wide x 8.5 tall giving us about 3 and a quarter cord in that stack.


The most recent holzhausen compared to one of it's sisters. It is noticeably larger.


All of the stacks are seasoning nicely in our hot summer heat. I figure that we have just a tad over 9 cord total in all of the stacks. That's probably two years ahead given the fuel consumption of the small cat stove that we'll install in the near future, maybe more.


Thanks for tagging along everyone. I think that we can call this one a wrap which is a good thing because it's time for a motorcycle trip.


Peace and love!