Is "Cordwood" really a thing?

[Gary Prentice]

So cordwood is like 'whites' when you're sorting the laundrey ( or the missus is) it can be a pair of briefs, t-shirt, shirt etc 

 

As long as it isn't 'coloured' (can I say that?) in that it isn't 'white' ( or   Chippable/ millable/for pulp, etc ) it's cordwood.

 

 

glad that's cleared up

[Beardie]

You said in the OP that timber merchants were confused by the term. They are probably the wrong people to ask, as wood too thin for milling is unlikely to be dealt with by them.

[Billhook]

On 02/11/2017 at 17:36, daltontrees said:

I think the etymology of quintal is from the word 'cent-' meaning hundred, rahtehr than 'quint-' menaing five. If you remember those teeny wee Fiats called the 500, pronounced 'seeng-co-chen-tay', the chen-tay it is hundred, and the pronounciation of it is a lot more like quinte than the 'seeng-co' bit is.

 

The first guy that paid for an imperial quintal and got a metric one must have been well pleased. It's basically twice as big.

Thanks for clearing that one up.

Is there any mention of moisture content with the various cord definitions?

Selling it by weight as in the quintal seems to be a better method.   I assume only by looking at the crates in Italy that they were either 500kg or 1000 kg in various different split sizes.  So 5 or 10 quintal crates, and the crate size may vary according to the wood.

A cord of poplar is going to be a lot lighter than a cord of beech.

[openspaceman]

21 hours ago, skc101fc said:

 cordwood - the branchy bits or small diameter sawlog tops, usually for the firewood market,

The point for me is as above because roundwood  was worth more sent to the pulpmill than firewood delivered in.  The tops of bigger oaks were often too crooked to cut 2.4 metres for pulpwood . Prior to 1984 it didn't matter a lot because pulp mills accepted 1m lengths but with grapple loading (instead of hand loading) lorries the mills needed longer lengths and reacted to people trying to send tops in by specifying  the length had to pass down a 16" tube (mixed units I know). One of my employees, who doesn't seem to post here any more, was taught that "half a bend is no bend at all" and we would sneak in lengths with diagonal cut ends to meet the length and still be straight enough. Although I ended up with many arguments with the W anchor at the gate and often had arbitrary tonnage reductions overall it still paid to push the envelope but much got relegated to firewood .

 

In the distant past when axes did the snedding and crosscuts the, erm, crosscutting 4ft was a good compromise for handling and straightness. It also meant two opposing pieces could rest on the andirons of an inglenook and only burn at the point they overlapped, saving unnecessary cross cutting and splitting

[flatyre]

Now we all agree that a cord is an 8x4x4 stack of unprocessed cordwood of any type of wood, why not make it a sticky so anyone selling or buying cord on the forum will be reading from the same page so to speak?