After transferring the large stack of pre-cut firewood that I had staged behind the garden fence next to the Ranger frame, it was time to actually start cutting and splitting everything and stacking it on the pallets in the new firewood staging area. I moved the log splitter and my chair over to near the eastern fence line in the midway in order to do this work. I also had to bring out the chainsaw as some of this wood would need to be cut down into smaller lengths for the splitter and for stacking. Some cuts were already short enough to go right on the splitter and hence would be quickly split and stacked but others being several feet long would need to be cut down. Luckily while the pieces were several feet long they were only a few inches wide and so would only require one splitting or two to take them down into manageable sized pieces for use in the stove or in a firepit outside.
Of course by this time the chain on the saw was getting on the dull side so I only had a few cuts before I had to swap out the chain. I'll end up sharpening the old chain to try and get a little more life out of that one but before its all said and done, I'll end up going through some chains. As I continued to cut and split wood and started stacking the stuff, I started to question whether I'll actually have enough room to get all of this wood stacked up. I was making sure to utilize every bit of space to maintain the stack height all across the board so I can get all this wood stacked up. So far it seems like things are going good, I still have a fair amount of space on the pallets available. As before, I took the time to split wood to varying degrees. Some splits were split to make pieces that were thick enough to achieve long burns while some pieces were split to be small enough that they would make good intermediate burn pieces. Some pieces were a few inches in width while some were only an inch or two in width. I had to do this as I would have to be able to get the fires started without having to use as much cardboard or wax firestarters as I've had to do in the past. I want to get to the point where my selection of cuts will allow me to be able to get a kindling fire started and gradually fuel it up until I get a good enough burn that will allow the larger several inch thick chunks take fire easily. After the session that I did which lasted for about 90 minutes, I managed to get around three full wheelbarrows full of split wood moved to the firewood staging area and stacked up neatly. While I did manage to cut and split some rather large logs and cut down some long narrow logs, from a distance it barely looks like I made a dent in the pile of pre-cut wood on the ground. I wanted to move around through the large logs and the narrow long longs as I wanted to get an even stacking of different woods as well. This is because I didn't want to have a large section of the stacking that only consists of kindling wood or long burn wood. When I gather wood to bring in the house I want to be able to work my way through the stack from one end to another, being able to grab enough kindling wood and long burn wood to allow me to get the fire I want while not having an uneven usage of wood in the stack. It's that uneven usage that would have the stack at risk of falling over plus it would make it harder to be able to stack up fresh wood if I have fresh wood randomly stacked all through the seasoned wood along the length of the stack. One funny thing that one who looks at some of the wood in this picture might notice is how some of this wood, especially the narrow long logs, have old poison ivy vines still attached to the trunks. This stuff was a thorn in my side when I was cutting up the Fallen Trees to make this pre-cut pile since my contact with the PI would have me itching like crazy for the next couple of weeks until I stopped fooling with the wood. Unfortunately I will probably have to deal with this again as I had to take time to peel off the PI vines as much as possible before stacking the wood up. I don't want to burn this wood inside if I can avoid it because unlike burning outside where the smoke and vapors from burning PI can be avoided, inside the walls of a house, the smoke and vapors will linger enough that they could possibly cause respiratory problems for us. Any of the pieces of wood I do encounter that still have PI vines on them will more than likely be set aside to be used in burns outside when I'm working on something so the smoke won't be as much of a problem for us. But as you can see, there is still a lot of cutting and splitting to do here.
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