Me Time

The dry day that Mike had been waiting for had him on the day-long route to get a pickup load of grain.  I wanted to take advantage of a day without the supervisor around so I took the opportunity for a little time to attack the log deck and get a little firewood cut.

With the two dogs, my trusty earplugs, metal toed boots, and a freshly sharpened (thank you Mike) chainsaw, we moved to the log deck in the close landing. When I am working with the saw, the dogs are busy scouting around so I don’t have to worry about them. They stop by every once in a while to make sure that I can see them for a moment or two of check-in time before scooting off in another direction.

Marking the 16 inch length blocks takes more time than the actual cutting does. The person who piled up the logs in the deck those many months ago (again, thank you Mike) likes nice, neat, relatively compact piles. Keeping the deck compacted allows for cutting blocks off safely since the deck holds the far side of the log that is being cut. That is as compact as you can make odd-sized, twisted, gnarly, forked, two inch diameter and two feet diameter, ten foot long ones and eighty foot long ones piled together into a neat deck.

Then it comes to cutting the blocks. In my mind it is very calculated that I mark the blocks that I can cut without being in the way of any of the other logs, that and getting the most blocks of firewood out of the ones that are marked in a single pass through with the saw. Efficiency as well as how fast I can get a pile of wood ready to be processed into chunks of firewood or kindling is what I am thinking with my logic in full gear.

In reality, many of the marked lengths cannot be cut until the one in front, or just above or below has been cut so I cannot reach all the marked blocks with the first go through or pass across the log deck as I am cutting off the blocks.

This day I only ran the saw for one tank of fuel which is about a half hour running time, but the quick project ended up to take more than two hours. The biggest diameter log is too big for my saw and will have to wait until Mike has his big saw out to get it cut up. Then the blocks will need to be split into at least four pieces before they will be small enough to lift into the Gator to be taken to further processing.

The time seems to fly by when working on the log deck and I was even able to sneak in a break in-between the times when I had the saw running. Splitting the wood blocks up will have to wait for another day.

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