Advise on sweetgum

[mharmon]

I live in the pacific northwest and good hardwood is hard to come by. Mostly all we have is conifer softwoods like douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar. I have the opportunity to obtain ~1 cord of sweetgum for free. I hauled and split some of it tonight and WHOA!! It's tough stuff. I've read other posts saying that sweetgum isn't that great of a hardwood to burn.

How much better would it be then douglas fir or cedar? Currently coniferous softwood is what I burn and it's gone in no time.

Even if sweetgum is not that great for a hardwood, hopefully it'll last longer in my stove then all the doug fir and cedar I burn. Also, it is a given that the sweetgum will be properly seasoned before I burn it.

 

[JeffRey30747]

Sweetgum can be problematic to split for sure. I burn a small amount of it because it is a nuisance tree on my property and if I'm going to cut it down anyway, I might as well buck it up for the stove. It doesn't hold up well when exposed to the elements here in the southeast. I would expect that to be worse in your climate. Try to keep it good and dry and you should do better with it than with most softwoods.

 

[johnsopi]

It doesn’t hold up well when exposed to the elements You can say that again degrades fast IMO

 

[myzamboni]

I just got a free cord of it. It bucks easy, but splitting can be a crap shoot. Some splits real easy, some splits stringy and the grain looks twisted. I definitely wouldn't have paid for it or gone to pick it up, but I couldn't turn down delivered to my front lawn for free..

 

[myzamboni]

Another Swetgum lesson: It shrinks a lot when it dries. I just had to 'shake' my stack to get the sweetgum to settle as the stack was starting to look a little unstable. The height of the stack is probably 8" shorter than when I stacked in march.