Getting Wood, Again

Latest development on the wood store front:



We had a load delivered at the end of last week, and as today is my first day off since then I have spent the morning stacking it. There's about 2.5 cubic metres there in the middle (today's effort) which, according to my sources, weighs a little over a ton. The wood on the right is the previous load, which is now about 2/3 used. In the left, hidden behind the tarpaulin and wheelbarrow, is the miserable amount that I have managed to cut, split and stack all by myself. It's not even worth photographing. The goal of energy self-sufficiency is still a long way off.

The green Safeway boxes, by the way, are brilliant for carrying wood from the store to the utility room, where they sit for 24 hrs next to the boiler before being brought into the living room for use. Each box will carry almost exactly one evening's worth.

Splitting Maul

Let me introduce you to my new friend - the splitting maul:



I bought this last year when I built the log store, on the advice of someone in the village. Up to that point, I had split any logs that I used with either a hand-axe for the small stuff, or a felling axe for the biggies. Of course, splitting wood with either of those is like trying to cut cloth with a bread knife: they will do the job, but there are much better ways. Not that I realised.

The maul differs from the axe in several ways. The shaft is rounder and more robust, as often the handle needs to be levered about to free the head from the wood. The head is also heavier than the usual axe head, as the maul uses the sheer weight of the head to do the work. And, paradoxically, the heavier the head, the easier it is to use. It's something I have noticed with a lot of tools: the more weight something has, the easier it is to control. Heavy chisels cut better than light ones, heavy knives are more precise than flimsy ones; and of course any cook will tell you that heavy cutting implements in the kitchen are worth their weight in gold. Anna has a cleaver which is as heavy as the chopping board she uses it on, and nothing chops parsley more finely or easily. The key difference between the maul and a felling axe, though, is the shape of the head. The cutting edge is shorter and less sharp, and the head itself is much wider, being shaped like a wedge with convex sides. This means that, for any given impact with the wood, the maul will separate the fibres further apart and be less likely to get stuck in the split.



I shouldn't be surprised. A crosscut saw gets bogged down when ripping along the grain, and a ripsaw is useless at cross-cutting. One has teeth sharpened like knives; the other like chisels. The job of the axe is to cut sideways through as many fibres as possible, so it is slim and sharp. The job of the maul is to part the fibres from each other lengthways, so it is blunt and wide. Each to his own, as it were. I can't understand why it has taken me so long to realise this.



What it means in practice is that it works like a dream. I had got used to standing over my logs, cleaving them again and again with the axe, working up a sweat wiggling the head out of the cleft, and finally delivering a death blow with the axe swinging from waist height behind me, over my head and down into the wood with all my strength. I got pretty accurate with this, and could send both halves of a dry log anything up to 10 metres in opposite directions if I got the blow just right. We had to keep the dog indoors and ban children from the entire area when I was in full flow. With the maul, I place it on the end of the log, lift it to about shoulder height and drop it down with a little force behind it. The log usually splits obediently into two without drama.

I love my maul because it just works.

I also love it because it is clearly one of those tools that have been around for a long time. Axes are possibly the oldest woodworking tools in the world, and date from the time, probably in the Mesolithic period about 8000 years ago, when some bright spark had the idea of fastening a hand-axe to a handle to make things a little quicker and easier. Certainly the ancient Egyptians were using metal-headed axes in the construction of the pyramids in 2000BC. Whether the splitting maul developed as a specialised form of axe, or from the addition of a cutting edge to a long hammer (the word is from Old French mail, and is related to 'mallet'), I don't know, but I am sure that the maul must have been around in something close to its present form for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It works, and there is nothing that could be done to make it work better. (The safety pin has a similarly noble lineage: the basic design was perfected in the Bronze Age, and no significant improvements have been made since then.)

Compared to splitting wood with a felling axe, I reckon it reduces the overall effort by half, and for an old git that makes a big difference.

It cost me around £30 from the village hardware store, and I don't regret a penny of it. If you have any logs to split, it's highly recommended.

Logging Operations

"Wood warms you twice," my mother used to say. "Once when you cut it, and once when you burn it."

She wasn't wrong there. Today I got my own logging operation up and running. I have a large stack of timber that has been sitting in a corner, gently rotting, for a number of years. Some elm, some cherry, all between 3" and 6" in diameter, mostly sodden on the outside, but still with good heartwood. I cleared a corner of the paddock which is sheltered under some trees and using the small car trailer I have as a kind of mega-wheelbarrow I carried my first load there. Then I visited Anna's mother's old house (still empty and up for sale) and appropriated an ancient saw-horse that I had my eye on. I hope nobody wanted it. And then I got the chainsaw out and filled it with oil and 50:1 two-stroke mix. I grabbed the splitting maul and took everything to the paddock. And then I got to work.

Even with power assistance, it's heavy work lugging the logs on to the saw-horse, cutting them up and then splitting them to stove-friendly dimensions. By the time I had done the first trailer-load (1 trailerful = 3 wheelbarrows of cut logs) and stacked them in the shelter, I was done in. But seeing the newly-repaired end of the log store being filled up with my own logs - free, apart from the cost of the petrol for the saw - was very good. The wood I did today is so wet that I don't expect it to be ready for at least a year, but stacking it at the back of the store ready to let the wind do its desiccating work was a bit like buying a good wine for the cellar - it's that feeling of laying something down for the future which is so satisfying.

And it's real Man Stuff, too.

Now that I have all the gear in place, I will be able to do a bit at a time, which at my age is probably the only way I am going to get a big task done. The days when I could have cut, sawn, split and stacked a ton of logs in a day are gone. From the quantity that I managed to achieve today, I reckon there are another ten similar sessions before I fill the first bay. Eating an elephant, kind of thing.

The first barrowload was celebrated with a can of beer and a nice sit-down.

Phew.

Getting Wood

In January 2009, I built a log store in my back garden. I like doing stuff like that, but there was a good reason behind it.

We had installed a Morsø Squirrel multi-fuel stove in about 1997. This was supposed to burn everything from wood to coal, and even peat, and we had visions of free heat from burning the tons of wood that we could pick up on any walk with half a mile of the house. Of course, wood isn't free at all. It needs to be cut down, and cut to length, and split, and dried, and stored - materials: free, labour: lots. In the end, it was always easier to order another ton of anthracite and promise that next year we would really start to 'get wood', as it were.



Now, the thing lasted 12 years, so I can't really complain, but eventually the acids, formed when the stove was idling at a low temperature overnight with a bellyful of Onllywyn Colliery's best, had eaten away at the boiler seams and it started to leak. I took the stove out to see if I could replace the boiler, but the iron casing was damaged by the rust and it was beyond repair.



The stove was a brilliant performer. Running non-stop from October to March, it consumed about one tonne of coal. We got the version with a small boiler fitted above the firebox and this was plumbed into our domestic hot water cylinder, so that for the whole of winter we had more hot water than we knew what to do with. We decided to replace it with an identical stove. The stove died in November 2008, and it was mid-January before we could source a new one, so that was the coldest Christmas I can remember in a long time, but eventually it was installed and good to go.

This time, we were determined to run it on wood alone. We found a local source of seasoned firewood, and I started to build a store in the garden. It took me about a week, and when it was finished it looked like this:



It's made of treated timber with an all-weather Onduline roof, which is similar to corrugated iron, but made of a bituminous substance that is supposed to last for ever. It has three bays, each able to hold about 2.5 m³ of timber. My calculations suggested that I would get through about 6 tonnes a year, so this is barely enough. The ideal would be to have three times that amount - one unit being filled, one with wood seasoning, and one in use. But that was clearly too much for our little plot, so we settled on about 7.5 m³ capacity and a willingness to buy wood in as needed, if our own stocks ran out.

We bought our first load, which was delivered in a pile on the driveway. I spent an afternoon with Anna's grandchildren getting the logs stacked in the first bay. By tea-time, they were stacked neatly and I was very pleased with myself. In the morning, to by dismay, the logs had spilled out onto the grass. The weight of the wood had collapsed the rear structure of the store and dumped the wood out of the front. I couldn't face another back-breaking day of moving the logs to the next bay (and there was no guarantee the same thing wouldn't happen there), so I decided to wait until the wood was almost used up and then tackle it.

That was a year and a half ago. Eventually I got some more wood delivered and put it into the third bay, but this time tumbled rather than stacked, so that the weight would be better distributed. This one seemed to hold. Eventually, I cleared out the collapsed end and used it to store garden furniture and the incinerator. But the collapsed part of it always troubled me.

This week, I decided to tackle it, as the weather has been reasonable and winter is approaching. In the end, it took me less than a day. I stripped out all the floorboarding and jacked up the cross-pieces to their correct positions. Then I cut some massive rounds from an old telegraph pole that Western Power had left in the paddock and wedged those under the framing. Finally I tied all the joints together with heavy-duty metal angle brackets. Originally, I had fastened the joints together with 3" woodscrews, but these had sheared off with the weight of the timber. 2.5 m³ of hardwood, I now realise, weighs about 1½ tonnes. Hah. If I had bothered to rebate all the posts and fit the framing into the rebates, I am sure the thing would have held together fine in the first place. But, as usual, I wanted to get it finished and took the quickest way. I never learn.



Anyway, it's all fixed now - square and straight and ready for the next delivery of timber. To cut up the telegraph pole I had to get the chainsaw out of hibernation, so now the mood is upon me to start cutting my own timber. There's plenty around me. I've got to fill the mended part with something, fast.

There's only one question left to ask - why the fuck did it take me nearly two years to get around to doing this?