Hi friends! I made a nice CL score this past weekend of some giant Black Locust here in Seattle.
All the wood came from one huge branch that fell off the tree a couple of months ago. The neighborhood is one of those big city suburban old neighborhoods with narrow streets and cars parked on both sides. The branch made minced meat out of six cars parked under it as the story was told by the neighbors.
Fortunately a few cars moved out of the way, so I was able to back the trailer onto the grass area between the street and the sidewalk. Then the chainsaw work started. After 2.5 or 3 hours the wood was bucked and loaded into the trailer.
The rounds were pretty darn heavy even though they weren't giant.
Usually when I bring a trailer load home, I dump it all in the back yard and work it from there. I had recently purchased a used Gravely/Airens 22 ton splitter on CL for a steal, so I had been lifting rounds up and splitting horizontally. On the trip down south to Tacoma and home, my already sore back began to be a motivational tool that spurred some ideas. I was trying to picture in my mind the height of the log cradle on the splitter compared to the height of the trailer deck and what it would take to get the wood directly from the trailer to the splitter.
This is what I came up with.
It worked like a charm. I used the hookaroon to move the rounds to the trailer ramp, then up to the splitter. From there I would split, use the trailer ramp as a table to hold the large split halves, and throw split sized pieces in the big wheelbarrow. From there I would wheel the barrow back to the stack and stack the wood right then. This technique has greatly reduced the amount of handling and heavy lifting I was doing before. I'm pretty excited about it, and I'm well on my way to getting three years ahead. I hope it helps some of you out too.
By the way, I unloaded the trailer, split and stacked all that Locust in about 4 hours. Not the fastest, but I also didn't break my back.
All the wood came from one huge branch that fell off the tree a couple of months ago. The neighborhood is one of those big city suburban old neighborhoods with narrow streets and cars parked on both sides. The branch made minced meat out of six cars parked under it as the story was told by the neighbors.
Fortunately a few cars moved out of the way, so I was able to back the trailer onto the grass area between the street and the sidewalk. Then the chainsaw work started. After 2.5 or 3 hours the wood was bucked and loaded into the trailer.
The rounds were pretty darn heavy even though they weren't giant.
Usually when I bring a trailer load home, I dump it all in the back yard and work it from there. I had recently purchased a used Gravely/Airens 22 ton splitter on CL for a steal, so I had been lifting rounds up and splitting horizontally. On the trip down south to Tacoma and home, my already sore back began to be a motivational tool that spurred some ideas. I was trying to picture in my mind the height of the log cradle on the splitter compared to the height of the trailer deck and what it would take to get the wood directly from the trailer to the splitter.
This is what I came up with.
It worked like a charm. I used the hookaroon to move the rounds to the trailer ramp, then up to the splitter. From there I would split, use the trailer ramp as a table to hold the large split halves, and throw split sized pieces in the big wheelbarrow. From there I would wheel the barrow back to the stack and stack the wood right then. This technique has greatly reduced the amount of handling and heavy lifting I was doing before. I'm pretty excited about it, and I'm well on my way to getting three years ahead. I hope it helps some of you out too.
By the way, I unloaded the trailer, split and stacked all that Locust in about 4 hours. Not the fastest, but I also didn't break my back.
