Had a hankerin' to get some wood today. Pics.

[Kenster]

Still want to build up my stash for the next couple of years. As I've said before, I have a honey hole at a friend's ranch where I can take my fill of recently downed water oak that he has pushed off into a dry creek bed. More wood than I'll ever be able to use. I went out there today and found a big trunk with some of the larger branches still attached. They had burned a lot of the tree top but a lot was left. Having so much wood available, I can be very picky. I wanted wood from the trunk and big, straight limbs. I cut out a section of trunk that ran between a big, fat, gnarly bottom section up to where it 'Y's' off into the large branches. I got six or seven 20 inch long rounds out of the trunk, which was about 22 inches in diameter.
I know this tree has been down since a summer storm. It was still unbelievably wet. The rounds were so heavy I had to split them into quarters to lift them into the truck and it was still a strain. Each quarter of a round weighed close to 75 pounds, I'll bet. My 10 pound maul and my Fiskar's mostly bounced off the wood. I used two metal splitting wedges and the back side of the maul to split most of the rounds. Water/sap would be squeezed out of the wood where I drove in a wedge. Because the wood was so wet, it was kinda stringy in the center and rarely separated when split, often it kept the wedges tight inside until I flipped the round over on its other end and whacked it with the maul a few times. I got almost a short bed F-150 load. I'll split it further tomorrow and put it in the stacks for 2012-2013.

I should have done this yesterday when the high was in the 60s. It was 85 when I was out there today. 85 in Februrary?? That's just crazy. Two weeks ago the highs were in the 20s!

Here's a picture of the mother trunk:

Just a small sample of some of the splits.

Loaded up for the trip home. About 12 miles away.

 

[thewoodlands]

[quote author="Kenster"




Kenster, nice work on a hot day, still single digits up here with a possible 6-10 inches of snow coming on late thursday and friday.




Zap

 

[jhoff310]

nice load..looks like you had a nice day to work outside. Its still cool here, 4-6" of snow tomorrow night into friday. I am way behind on processing wood. If I had to guess I would say I have probably 8-10 cords to cut and split, more coming...when youre that far behind is it good or bad

Jeff

 

[Kenster]

Jeff, I figure if the wood is cut, the pile of rounds isn't going anywhere. Even if I go out and split for an hour or so, I'll eventually get it done. But I can't split it if ain't cut.

 

[andrewdee]

nice load..looks like you had a nice day to work outside. Its still cool here, 4-6" of snow tomorrow night into friday. I am way behind on processing wood. If I had to guess I would say I have probably 8-10 cords to cut and split, more coming...when youre that far behind is it good or bad

Jeff

It is good the fact is that you have wood

 

[Wood Duck]

Interesting that I don't see any medullary rays in the end of those logs. Oaks are supposed to have medullary rays, and on a lot of trees they are really obvious. I guess Water Oak medulary rays aren't very obvious, at least not in pictures. We don't see many pictures of Water Oak here so it is nice to have some good pics.

I had a hankerin' to cut wood yesterday too, but we have lots of snow, a crust of ice underneath the snow, and I don't have a place where I can go when I want to cut wood. You're lucky on several counts - you have it all except really cold weather to make you appreciate all that oak.

 

[Kenster]

Medullary rays, huh? hmmmm. My graduate work not being in Botany, and never having seen that term mentioned in this forum before, I had to resort to research: Google.

I see that the rays are basically a path connecting the core or pith of the tree to the outer bands/ bark to supply nutrients. One source mentioned that in some species of oak the rays are not prominent on cross cuts but show up more on biased or quarter cuts, such as planks for flooring. Anyway I was curious enough to go back out and take another picture of what I thought might be said rays. Let me know if this qualifies as a Medullary Ray. This is something new I wasn't expecting to learn about today.

BTW, this is definitely water oak.

 

[Wood Duck]

I guess I see a couple of lines on the new picture that could be medullary rays, but my graduate work not being in botany I am not sure. Hopefully somebody who knows more will chime in. I am not suggesting you don't have Water Oak, just commenting how hard it is to see the rays compared to some other oaks.