coppicer

These trees are the remains of a conifer plantation in a local nature reserve that is being slowly being removed and replaced with native woodland. Do you think they might be Sitka?

That would be educational!

Understood, thank you, suggests that your 300-350kg result might be pretty typical for a "ton" bag of logs with high moisture content, after all.

So there's not quite as much wood in one of your neatly strapped bundles as there would be in a ton (1m x 1m x 1m) bag, and a full cube would be, as you point out, upwards of 500kg for the Lodgepole when wet. Quite a weight. With regard to the Sitka, I don't think I've ever (knowingly) seen one; do you have access to a plantation...? Finally, may I ask which crane scales you bought, and whether you rate them - early days I know, but thinking of getting a pair myself.

Thank you, that's useful to know. Sounds surprisingly strong.

Update: how could I overlooked the obvious choice? Ag Unimog with Hiab!

That's a nice idea - natural kiln effect! I'm in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, so even for a polytunnel I'd need planning permission, which can be quite onerous. I wouldn't be able to have one near the house (my wife does actually want one, but for her use, not for drying wood), and it can't be in the fields due to stock, so it would need to be in the woodlands itself. Also I'd like to avoid handling the wood twice. That is, cutting and splitting the wood, then stacking in polytunnel, waiting 12-18 months, then carrying it from the polytunnel to the house and storing it somehow. None of these difficulties are insurmountable, though, and I haven't settled on any one approach. Unlikely to have the cash to buy anything for using on the firewood this year, so not in a hurry. But it's good to give ideas some time to percolate!

Never enough granularity is there...

Thanks for these figures. I'd be interested to hear what weights you get with your new crane scales. I'm in the early stages of thinking about how to get a more efficient workflow for firewood, but starting from a very different place to you. The firewood isn't a business for me, just a chance to get outdoors away from my desk, get some exercise, do a bit of problem-solving, and help keep the woodland properly managed. There's an opportunity to save money on energy over the long term, but that's only one factor among many. So far, felling trees and cutting them up with a Truncator 6Pro has worked well for my (low) volumes, but the problem has always been drying and storage. Since I have some large windblown trees to get through, in addition to the smaller ones that I fell, this problem is only going to get more pressing over the next year or two. I don't have any internal or even covered storage space, so I'm thinking of using those big vented bags, one to a pallet, with a bit of tarp placed inside and on top to keep off the worst of any wet. The problem I can see with that approach is that once you fill a bag they can no longer be handled manually. If I fill the bags and leave them in the yard or garden, I'm going to have a large pile of huge plastic blobs next to the lawn. The wife doesn't think is a good idea and I understand her point of view. If I fill the bags where I process the firewood in the woodland, I would really struggle to transport them back to the house as they are. As far as I can see, there are three options for transport. 1) Get a portable gantry crane, set it up where the bags are processed in the woodland, and use a hoist use to lift the pallet with a four-legged lifting chain, one leg to each corner. The bed of my Land Rover Hi-cap is 900 mm off the floor, so with the gantry at a height of, 3000 mm, it should be possible to raise a pallet high enough off the ground to allow the Land Rover to back under it. Then I would reverse the operation at the house end. I would probably only need 4-5 bags a winter. Problems? Fiddly to move the crane to and fro; time-consuming; not a cheap option. 2) Use plastic pallets. Get an electric winch and some metal ramps, attach winch to front of Land Rover bed (probably attached to chassis in some way) and pull the plastic pallet up metal ramps. Problems: most metal ramps specifically designed to be non-slip; unloading probably quite tricky; would need a lot of space at unloading end. 3) Use a tractor. If the bag is on a pallet, and you have a tractor with pallet forks on either the three-point link or on a loader, then you're laughing. Unfortunately the affordable compacts - the smaller/garden tractor Kubota, Iseki, etc. - don't have hydraulics that look remotely capable of picking up 350 kg or 500 kg of bag stuffed with logs. So that suggests going bigger, and (if you avoid the wrecks that will need lots of spannering) before you know it you're looking at £10k or £15k rather than £3-4k. Something like your Kioti would be perfect, but expensive. I could sell the Landy to soften the blow, but a tatty old 300Tdi Hi-cap isn't going to fetch much. Problems: none, other than cost! So I'm still mulling things over...

Thank you for mentioning that. Unfortunately we don't have anywhere to put a gasification log boiler and a large accumulator. Currently we have a wood burner that provides space heating for the large open-plan living/dining/kitchen, which is where the family - myself excluded - is to be found most of the day during the colder months. I'm in my office, usually, but the house is heavily insulated, so a quick blast of central heating first thing keeps every room in the house in the high teens for the rest of the day. I just put on a jumper if the office cools. Anyway, the wood burner works well, so we want to keep that. If we install a thermal store and that works as expected with the solar thermal during the summer, we might replace the woodburner with one that has a boiler, maybe a Dowling Sumo, and use that as another input to the thermal store to drive it through the winter. Not as efficient as a gasifier, of course, but more flexible and wouldn't require any new space. Edit: Sorry @difflock, didn't mean to hijack your thread!

I'm sure there is something that could be done, but in the longer term, rather than try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear I'd prefer to spend the money and have the job done right at the system level. My feeling is that it would be more difficult and time-consuming to come up, install and debug a custom-engineered solution than to just rip the whole tank out and replace it with something that works from the off. Whatever is done, I want minimal disruption, as the missus won't wear the water being off for longer than a working day.

I haven't been able to get (and wouldn't want) anybody on site due to the lockdown, but having sent photos around and talked to a few people on the internet and the phone, lack of stratification seems likely to be part of the problem. Essentially, instead of providing relatively small amounts of piping hot water, it's providing a whole lot of tepid water. I'm looking at getting something in the 300L range, such as a McDonald Thermflow or one of the TMS products. It won't be cheap, but the current system isn't either - and it can't even run a hot bath.

Well, maybe, but who knows where the price will be in six or twelve months? I'm still spending £1,000 a year on Calor gas, and I'd like to cut that by 50%, preferably 75%. We've already got solar thermal panels, but when they built the house five years back the hot water tank they put in for the system boiler seems to have been designed for Economy 7 overnight heating, which we don't have. The result is that you can't get a full bath's worth of hot water out of it using solar (even when the water coming from the solar panels is 75C), and it struggles to heat a full tank even using gas and the immersion heater. We probably need a new, properly designed thermal store, and if we did that then we'd likely need no gas at all for hot water between April and September - and we don't use any for cooking either. The next step after that would be to add a woodburner with a boiler and plug that into the tank as well. Obviously this all costs money, but savings on gas and electricity (getting that bloody IH out of the equation) of £750 plus a year should lead to payback within a few years. We don't have as much wood as you, but we should have enough to charge the thermal store for hot water twice a day without too many problems. As always, it's finding the money to get the project rolling!

Looks like a satisfying few days of work. Just about enough to last your wood burner through next winter, maybe?! I was looking at the photos with that little Kioti and was surprised that the FEL seems to be handling it so easily, and wondered how much the wood weighs. One of your billet bundles, for example, or one of those big builders bags. Surely a few hundred kg each? And what size is the Kioti? About 30hp?

Very nice setup. Saw looks a lot safer than many PTO circular saws I have seen. Is that a drott sitting there?

A good point. This belatedly occurred to me a couple of years back, so I switched to using either Aspen or Stihl MotoMix and I don't use conventional petrol in my saw at all any more. But might there be residues in the carb built up from the time before I switched to low-ethanol fuels...?

Thanks, it's about six years old. It doesn't get heavy use, but it does a bit every year. Using it a bit more at the moment, which is why I noticed the pickup issue. Will take a look at the points you raise, starting with the screw.

My little Stihl MS-181 starts from cold without problems, but it often has difficulty picking up off idle when it gets fully warmed up. If I just squeeze the throttle, it will often die unless I back off quickly, so I need to open it carefully and little by little until it picks up speed. It's like finding the exact edge at which it bite and go. Once it's wide open it's fine. The air filter looks OK. I have never replaced the spark plug, but I've had it for six years now so I thought I would do that. A picture of the old one is attached; looks a bit mucky to me. Maybe I messed up the fuel/air mix at some point? Is there a thread I can refer to for zeroing the carb and starting from default values for the two screws? Thanks!

Thanks, did a quick google but couldn't see much, will look more carefully later. Will also look at felling levers.

Thanks, sounds like an effective solution. I enjoy the work itself - it's about the only exercise I get apart from walking the dog - so it's more about the best way to approach it. Sorry for not making that clear.

Thanks for that. I haven't noticed any dieback as yet, but due to undergrowth (head-high brambles) I haven't been able to get into the middle for a thorough check (the photo was taken after a lot of recent work with a brushcutter and a mulching blade). However, there is definitely dieback on the main road a mile or so away, so it's only a matter of time. If I had been aware of dieback in 2005 I might have done things differently. ?

I have a 2-acre coppice full of ash, planted about 15 years ago, with an occasional downy birch and willow. I'm cutting a ride through the coppice, and need to fell dozens of trees. These range from sapling "failures" an inch or two thick, to decent little trees about 6 inches at chest height, though most are not that large. Because they were planted so close together (I think 1.5m) 99% of them are dead straight with little to no lean. I have succeeded with the usual notch and back cut on a few larger trees, but the smaller ones are more difficult. They don't have the weight to fall like a larger tree, but if I try to cut straight through I usually trap the bar. Is the solution to cut diagonally, as described in this recent thread? Any pointers or advice much appreciated!

Thanks for those replies. After cross-cutting and splitting them the smell seems to have largely dissipated. They'll probably be fine in 12 months! Dan

I was clearing up some large branches that had been blown off an oak this afternoon, just cutting them into lengths of about 2m. Generally the wood looks in good shape, some marks but nothing really noticeable with the exception of a couple of points where the wood gave off a strong sour smell when being cut, a bit like vinegar. At one point it was even weeping a little fluid (see below). I'm guess that there is some rot in there but I know nothing about tree diseases. Can anybody enlighten me? My intention is to cross-cut for firewood and I'm just wondering if this apparent flaw in the wood will make it less suited for that. Thanks Dan

Are they less safe or do they basically off similar levels of protection?