White Oak

I met a local woman a few weeks ago at a party and we started talking about trees and wood. She said that she had a bunch of trees down on her 4 acres that she'd be happy to have take away for her. This was before hurricane Sandy. I finally got over yesterday to have a look. This White Oak is down in front of the house. Nice and close to the driveway.

It is huge!

Here's one with me in it for scale.


Here;s another one to get an idea of the size of the root ball.


I'll probably start picking away at this in a few weeks. I'm not sure how to deal with the roots. In a perfect world, they'd fall back in the hole when there's enough trunk cut off. There's lots of cutting to do before I have worry about that anyway.
More pics when I get into this.

I'm sure she would like that one fixed Flatbedford........now don't hit and run

Slow & easy with that one.
Some stored energy in several directions.
Close access near the driveway will reduce the effort some .
Have fun

ya there is a lil bit of work ahead of you there....proceed carefully and enjoy the btu's

Steve, you have a lot of work ahead of you! Maybe you can rent some space to store the wood?

When you get close to the root ball and yu dont have much weight left the thing might just stand up on ya, some of that "stored energy" to watch out for.

Agree be careful with that one...it is going to stand back up. Going to be more than a couple loads there.

That's gonna be fun cutting ,good pungent smell,and burns awesome when seasoned,I've got some white oak cut in 2000 when all I burned was a fireplace it's as hard as petrified wood,I wonder if it'l even burn. Happy cutting.

Great stuff,smells nice either green or decades old.Can be a bit stringy to split at times,not as easy compared to Red Oak.Intense heat,starts quickly.

Looks like you have some room underneath it near the root ball.Undercut as close as you can to it,about 1/2 way up.Remove saw & make another cut from the top,a couple inches to the side about 1/2 way down.Drop a wedge in the kerf after the first few inches then continue sawing until it breaks free.That should relieve the pressure from any binding.Watch carefully & proceed with caution,you shouldnt have any problems.

I really hope so. This is right in front of the house, and this woman does not have the cash to have somebody haul it away.

Flatbedford, good score indeed. In my humble opinion though, I don't think that one will stand back up. Appears that most of root ball is out of ground broken off. Would be nice if it did. Either way you are helping yourself and her out too.

I had a bunch of locust trees that fell like that and as I cut them the closer I got to the root ball they tree would raise up nice and slow and make the perfect cutting opportunity for me....it was blissful cutting. did 9 trees like that. Nice score and good luck.

Nice find! I just split some green White Oak recently. It's heavy and a little stringy, but split OK. Good stove chow in 3 years. It's pretty slow seasoning. Red Oak is a lot easier to split, but OTOH I managed to get through this stuff with my new electric splitter, so it wasn't that tough.

I'll be splitting by hand. I am spoiled by the ease of Red Oak.

I guess it was more than a few weeks but a friend of mine and I finally got back to this last week. There is a huge amount of wood there and yes, there was lots of potential energy stored in it it too! Not just thermal, but kinetic too! We picked away at it slowly and carefully. The trunks practically blew apart during some cuts, but we moved very slowly and carefully so that we could get the hell out of the way if need be. All we really did was take the tops off. There is lots of cleanup to go yet.
This was so splintered that as we cut it, all the pieces were moving around and jammed up the saw a few times.


Lots of wood to get out of the woods. Luckily, the driveway is only 10'-20' from the tree, but sometimes, up hill from it. I'm hoping I can skid logs out either with my Garden tractor or F250.


Here's an idea of the scale of this thing.

We didn't get close enough to the root ball to see any movement. I have no idea what direction it will go.


I have this idea of using my big old 4 ton come a long, a couple snatch blocks, and a bunch of wire rope to encourage it to roll back into the hole when we cut through the trunk.
It will be quite a bit of cutting though.
My buddy's 3120 and 38" bar will have no problem with the cut. We are just worried about what will happen after the cut. In a perfect world, the root ball will roll back into the hole. In a less than perfect world, it will stay there and look like crap for 50 years. In a lousy world it will roll into the little stream and dam it up. In a tragic world, it will roll down the hill, through about 50' of woods and end up in the street!
There's lots of cutting and stacking to do before I have to deal with this anyway. The good news is that she said I can stack the wood on her property until I have room at my place. That should be after a month or so of burning next season. Ultimately, this will be 2016-17 wood.

wow - good luck with that flatbed, nice score!

The White is jackpot wood, but you are earning it this time!

Steve, I've never seen one miss the hole yet. They just seem to always go back where they were before.

very nice score ! good job