smokinjay said:
Nice clean fell! Not your first...........
No, but I don't do it every day and I've been around mother nature long enough to know the first time you feel over confident she'll wack you good :ahhh:
Willman said:
Looks like some saw logs there. Was it worth milling?
Will
If I had a mill I might have tried to save out the butt log, other than that these open growth firs just make knots that are too big for the effort/quality. Sometimes too much effort to split too! Plus I would still have to get the log to my house. The branches are like active solar panels, a bunch of the energy that hits limbs goes into making the limb bigger, thus a bigger energy collector and bigger knots. Fir is not shade tolerant so if they plant a bunch in a clear cut they will compete for sunlight by growing up and not out, that makes the interior limbs die and smaller knots and more valuable wood. All this you probably know well since you mill but of course if this housing bust never ends, the wood may never be worth much until they become old growth again!
bogydave said:
Nice score.
You got to let us know how many cords in a tree that size. (3+ my guess)
Looks like a "fun" bunch of rounds to split.
Those rounds pictured + a few more came to just over 1.25 cords. (stacked pretty tight) (see pic) I didn't split the bottom 4 rounds as a buddy wanted a couple of vice stands (as soon as I make them level!) I dumped another truck load of rounds outside my barn so I'm guessing I got just under 2 cords worth. I'm guessing the tree was 100-110' tall but next time I'll measure. The locals say a full log truck has 8-9 cords of wood but usually of smaller diameter and I'm thinking a full truck would have had about 18-20 total of these 2 log sizes. At around 9 cords per truck, 2 logs per cord, I'm probably doing well to get 2 cords. I'm sure with smaller splits and looser stacking I could make more cords but I'm burning it not selling it ;-) Incidentally the tree was 30" DBH and 50 years old.
Wood Duck said:
I have never heard of or thought of separating the outer splits from the inner ones. Interesting that you noticed a difference. I don't think there is such a large difference in eastern hardwood trees or I think I would have noticed. Maybe the difference is particularly large in the spring.
Wood Duck, I'm guessing the hardwoods being more dense may retain the interior moisture more than the fir. And you might right about Spring increasing the MC in the outside splits. I don't notice the difference on smaller fir <20" (although I'm sure MC is probably less in the middle) or on hemlock, maple & alder around here but the difference on these splits was just too big to ignore. I tried to pick 2 equal sized pieces and the outer split on the right weighs 5 lbs 9 oz more than the one on the scale (6 lb 2.6oz) almost twice as heavy and measured over 42% verses 23% MC.