Since we had acquired the 12" lithium battery powered chainsaw we had the edge in our fight against all of the fallen trees that we've had to cut up since the storm came through. Of course we used our neighbor's gas saw for the larger stuff (trunks), but the battery saw did more than its fair share of cutting branches down and even small sections of branches up to 8" in diameter. The thing is, there's a lot of stuff still on the ground that needs to be cut up, including very wide trunks that are a foot+ in diameter. These trunks will need to be split in order to allow them to dry out faster and to render them usable in the wood stove. To do all of this we picked up two new tools and brought out an old standby to work along side these new acquisitions.
The first tool is another lithium battery powered chainsaw. This saw is an 18" bar, 80v battery powered saw that is supposed to be equivalent to a 50cc saw in power. This saw will allow us to cut into the big stuff without having to fight the quirks of the gas saws or having to move things close enough to a plug in power source to use the plug up electric saw. This saw (and many in its class) are equal in price to a name brand gas chainsaw of similar size so you would have to be ready to shell out some money if you want this new tech. This isn't one of those bullshit refurbished Poulan saws you see for $125 here and there.
The next tool that we picked up that is definitely an asset is a plug in electric log splitter. While not the large powerful gas unit like our neighbor's log splitter, it is still plenty capable of getting the job done with the logs we have around here. This unit is on wheels making it easily portable and being a 110v unit, able to be used anywhere standard power or genny power is available. Compared to the larger gas units, this machine is plenty affordable and quiet in use. It definitely beats smashing wedges into logs with a sledgehammer all day. The amount of wood that can be split in one hour with this splitter would take hours using a wedge and sledge.
Using the wheelbarrow we was able to split a large amount of logs in just a few hours total time, enough that I was able to stack our firewood shed 3/4 full and barely make a dent in the total of trunks and already cut logs that are on the ground. I had to remove the already seasoned firewood that still remained in the firewood shed and stack it on a pallet just outside the firewood shed in order to make room to stack the new wood. I'll definitely be needing to lay a couple more pallets down outside the shed to stack all of the wood before I'm done, there is a LOT of wood, some that we haven't even cut into manageable logs yet. Again, from the way it looks, by the time we are done cutting all of the wood up, including the larger portions of the branches that are a couple inches wide, we will have enough firewood to last us a couple of seasons. The last piece of equipment in our arsenal against the fallen....trees...is our chipper shredder. This tool has been in our possession for several years, gifted to us by a departed neighbor (RIP) and restored to full operation with a fresh carb. This will be the tool that we use to grind up the branches that are remaining after we cut the usable firewood pieces. The ground up branches will help bind the muddy ground in various spots around the yard, at least prior to putting gravel down. It'll be a more productive use for this material versus just burning it all up and getting nothing from any of it. With these tools, we will be able to quickly process all of this yard waste into usable resources for our future use around the homestead as well as be ready for when the next fallen tree stands in our way, or is just unsightly enough that it needs to be removed, or, if we just need to replenish our stockpiles of firewood.
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