everyone got their wood put up?

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Hanko

Minister of Fire
Feb 26, 2008
795
livingstion co, Michigan
I just brought my last load in this morning, good dry oak. its been cut and split sense last fall. ive got 8 cords in the shed
 
Today is the day I split up the last 1.5 cord of softwood that has been cut to 14-18 inch length for the last several years. That makes about 6 cord and hope like heck its enough!!! Then I tear into the oak for next year!!!
 
Yup. Got 20-21 cords. Enough for about 7 years! Nice.
 
Backwoods Savage said:
Yup. Got 20-21 cords. Enough for about 7 years! Nice.
Does it actually last that long? I thought after about three years it starts to get too dry to burn as well as the less seasoned stuff?
 
Don't believe everything you hear. It will go bad if left uncovered and it gets wet constantly. However, leave it uncovered the first summer and then cover it. As long as you didn't put up punky wood, that wood will be fine. I've burned wood that has been stacked over 10 years!
 
My wife just came up with a good analogy. Wood buildings, for example. Even old barns that are uncovered, that is, paint all gone, roofing shot, etc. Those barns hold up for many years. Keep them covered and they may last as long as you will.
 
Okay, slight digression for the newbie..

I have a few pieces of wood, pretty thick splits, that have a sort of spongey look to them in the center part. Is that what's meant by "punky"? (these are part of a C/S/D purchase)
 
You joking or what? Always, always at least a 2 year supply on hand. Any thing less than that kind of stash just borders on "braindead".. :roll:
 
I got behind due to knee surgery, but I will have next years wood cut and split by winter! So brain dead may be one cause...mine was a snapped acl, ripped mcp and pcl. Darned if you don't need all three!!! :lol:
 
Sure hope so - 4.5 cords have be split and stacked out in the sun and wind since April 1. Should be plenty for the winter if the oak gets dry enough - about half is red oak, the other half is ash/elm/hickory. I'd post a pic, but my stack doesn't look nearly as nice as most fella's on here, so they will remain hidden.

AS to wood being too dry to burn, When we bought this place, the man that lived here before us left 12 cords of oak stashed in the wood shed that we paid his wife 500 bucks for... We just burned the last of that this last winter and much of it would have been 7 to 8 years old...It burned perfectly, nice and hot, and the big splits easily made it throught the night...wish we had 7-8 years supply on hand.
 
I have to restack a 12' section of our 3-4 cord rows. It seems one of the dogs must have pulled a lower piece out and made it fall. I also have some more wood to split and stack. I dropped a huge 28" thick standing dead beech tree which was the thickest I've ever seen. it probably died of old age. The 16-18" long rounds weigh at least 70lbs each. it might be ready to burn by late season.
 
I've got to finish stacking the last half cord that I split that is sitting in the driveway.

So far I have a half a cord of pine, 1.75 cords of oak, a quarter cord of osage, and a little over half a cord of box elder.

I've got about three cords in all right now (all free, with the exception of the $20 I paid for the pine).

I want to order a couple more cords already split from a dealer just to make sure I'm covered for this season, and then I'll start scrounging for next year.

-SF
 
Jay777 said:
Okay, slight digression for the newbie..

I have a few pieces of wood, pretty thick splits, that have a sort of spongey look to them in the center part. Is that what's meant by "punky"? (these are part of a C/S/D purchase)

Yup, Jay. That is punk. Depends on what type of wood it is, how much there is and how bad it is. If it is just a small part of the center, don't worry a bit about it. Just burn it as normal. If it is a lot, we have used the splitter and actually split out the punk and thrown that away, but most folks will usually try to burn it anyway. If it is too much, you'll get a lot of smoke but not much fire.

What type of wood do you have? Can you post a picture or two?
 
Yep, can't decide which stack to burn first. Think I will burn the outside wood first to save having to refill the woodshed. :)

Rick, our wood shed has been full since April. %-P
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Will probably burn this first. What you see I purchased for $100.00 but had to haul it myself.
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and a moment to remember...Alice enjoying the outside knowing it is warm inside.
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Carl said:
...Rick, our wood shed has been full since April. %-P

Carl, I'm workin' on it. I just finished the darned shed. Besides, I had to wait until we wrapped up taping the heartstopping season finale episode of "Logs of Our Lives". Now the film crew and caterer have all pulled out, and the studio's available for wood storage. :lol: Rick
 

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fossil said:
Carl said:
...Rick, our wood shed has been full since April. %-P

Carl, I'm workin' on it. I just finished the darned shed. Besides, I had to wait until we wrapped up taping the heartstopping season finale episode of "Logs of Our Lives". Now the film crew and caterer have all pulled out, and the studio's available for wood storage. :lol: Rick

Well, at leat it is starting to look like a woodshed! :)
 
no man said:
Boy I'll tell ya Fossil you really have the life. Just bring the tractor up with a bucket full of wood.
Split it and throw the wood in the shed.

You don't know the half of it, no man...my wife actually likes to stack wood...she'll have that heap of splits neatly stacked in the shed before I can keep the heap growing with the tractor and the splitter. Oh, how I love her! :coolsmile: Rick
 
I have a 110' row of wood on pallets, 2 rows deep, 18" splits, mostly maple but some oak and some pine. I am planning on about 6 cord for both stoves this winter, so I should have 2 years worth stacked. I still have about 3-4 cord left of misc. logs and such to process. I am really looking forward to being done with it for this year.
 
Backwoods Savage said:
Jay777 said:
Okay, slight digression for the newbie..

I have a few pieces of wood, pretty thick splits, that have a sort of spongey look to them in the center part. Is that what's meant by "punky"? (these are part of a C/S/D purchase)

Yup, Jay. That is punk. Depends on what type of wood it is, how much there is and how bad it is. If it is just a small part of the center, don't worry a bit about it. Just burn it as normal. If it is a lot, we have used the splitter and actually split out the punk and thrown that away, but most folks will usually try to burn it anyway. If it is too much, you'll get a lot of smoke but not much fire.

What type of wood do you have? Can you post a picture or two?
Thanks. Might be a good chance to try out my maul :)

I'm kinda ashamed of my first attempt at stacking, so maybe no picture :) (about 2/3 cord) My second stack is a bit better, but incomplete (currently about 1/3 cord, but should hold about 1.5 when I've filled all the pallet space...)
 
Jay, meet Punk. Punk, this is our friend Jay. This is from a Juniper tree that lay dead on the ground for quite some time before anyone bothered to limb, buck & split it. I got some good wood out of this tree, and I found some real punky old rotten wood in it. Not surprisingly, it was the part of the tree that lay in direct ground contact for so long that turned punky (rotten, deteriorated, sucky, spongy, call it what you will). When I split it to stack it, there were some pieces I just tossed, others I made an effort to split off the worst of the punky stuff. All the really bad stuff's long gone now, but I found this piece with a remnant of punk on it. As you can see, there's some good firewood in this split that was up off the ground, but there's still some of the really spongy "punky" stuff left on it. This piece of wood's goin' directly into one of my stoves this coming season...there's still some fuel here. Rick
 

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I'm glad you cleared this up.
We had a large oak fall in our backyard, some of it looked like that close to the center - the 4-6" close to the bark is good and hard. I split it, then broke off the punky parts, and stacked it.

We don't have nearly the room many of you guys do, and none of our wood is under roof. It's stacked up on old railroad ties next to a chainlink fence in roughly 30 foot rows, 6ft high.

I've thought about trying to tarp it in the fall, with bungie cords off the fence top rail or something to at least cover the top of the wood to keep rain and snow from soaking in....

So far leaving it exposed has worked OK -- we just split a HUGE load of elm - neighbors across the street dropped 5 large trees - we took 5 8ft pick up loads, and another friend of his took many more.

We are set for the heating season of 2009-2010, but we need to find more standing dead timber for this heating season.
 
milner351 said:
...some of it looked like that close to the center - the 4-6" close to the bark is good and hard.

Different process...tree rotting from the inside out, but from the woodburner's point of view, it doesn't really matter. With that Juniper I got, I split off a lot of punky wood and tossed it, and kept the sound wood to burn. Rick
 
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