Winter firewood all prepared

The winter's firewood is now ready! It only took us 5-6 hours to fill the remaining half of our store at the woods, using the new equipment we now have. Step one was to load the seasoned wood into the arbor trolley:

Next, wheel the trolley round to a suitable location and then the wood and be quickly transferred to the Truncator a few pieces at a time:

Position a wheelbarrow and cut off any long bits poking off the end of the Truncator:

Then move along and use the chainsaw to cut through the gaps in the Truncator:

Push the wheelbarrow along and tip the logs in (in practice Tracy was pushing the barrow while I tipped them):

Then take the wheelbarrow to the nearby log store and stack the logs - Tracy was doing this while I was loading the next batch of wood into the Truncator and sawing it - we had two wheelbarrows so we could both keep busy.

We got most of it done in an afternoon, then popped up the next morning for a couple of hours to finish the job:

There was still a bit of space in the log store at home, so after stowing the bench in the trailer, we mounted the Truncator on the side of it and loaded some more logs:

Then followed exactly the same process as before, but with the logs ending up in the trailer:

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As the Truncator was securely strapped down, we were able to just drive off when we were done, and sort everything out when we got home. Nice to have that job finished! :-)

Mike

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Moving logs: new trailer and a modified log trolley

Well, after our old trailer died, we picked out a new one, and it's finally arrived! The neat thing about it is that the front, as well as the back, can be removed:

It also has tie-down points on the floor, so we can lay ratchet straps in to secure the logs without bending the side walls:

The result is that large loads of logs can be placed evenly across the axle, and everything works nicely!

However, we now have an additional solution for moving logs as well. Some locations are hard to access, and you have to push the trailer backwards up a track, then reverse the car up to it before loading and driving out. So given that we now have a Stein Arbor Trolley, I paid a local engineering firm to make me an extra part for it, so we can pull it with the 4x4:

It will come in very useful in future I think!

Mike

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