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Is a whole lot cheaper than me being down with a back injury..besides my FEL picks up a half cord like its nothing.



Have you ever considered selling you firewood by the ton? It is legal to sell by the ton.

The local fellow up here buys logss for $33 tons and runs them through a multitek and sell it

green or seasoned
$175 $235 per cord

selling by the ton is legal and you can simply sell it green and dump it
 
I cant find it now but there is a company that makes a "bagging" system. Those bags could be loaded by conveyor, stacked to cure, then loaded onto dump trailer to end customer, one at a time without a second handling tractor/tailgator . Measured 1/2 cords each. Some german company. As usual. Still no hands and stackable and sold with your existing equipment.
 
I agree on the outfeed table. My plan is to stack my wood on pallets right off the splitter before it ever hits the ground, so the table is a must.
I am currently devising my system to never have to bend down and pick up wood with my back...EVER!! What do you think??

Step 1) Drop the tree..cut off branches..cut poles into grapple-manageable sized lengths.
Step 2) Skid poles to a central pickup location in the field with tractor.
Step 3) load poles into the dump trailer with tractor and grapple
Step 4) Dump poles at woodlot
Step 5) When ready to block and split, pick up pole off the ground with grapple, bring to splitter and cut rounds.
Step 6) Roll rounds onto log lift
Step 7) Split the wood..wood moves out to the log table...splits are stacked 1/2 cord each on a pre-made pallet at operator height..(Pallet sits on a rotating, spring-loaded table that adjusts height as its loaded)
Step 8) partially shrink-wrap completed pallet.. pick up by the pallet forks on my tractor FEL.
Step 9) Pallets are then moved into the sunnier side of my woodlot to dry out until Fall
Step 10) Customer calls needing wood...the dump trailer has a drop-down side..12 pallets are loaded onto the trailer..I drive to their house and unload the pallets.
Step 11) I blow the money on another chainsaw...LOL

I don't want to come across as rude, but here are a couple thoughts on your proposed process.

You want to grab the poles one at a time and buck them at the splitter and then split each piece, then stack them on the pallet before they hit the ground, and repeat.
I really think that it will be a huge waste of time and slow your productivity to a grind.

I do something similar to what you propose with a few differences.

Instead of bucking each pole one at a time, I buck the whole pile and push them close to the log lift with the skidder. This saves a ton of time picking up the saw, starting, cutting, putting down the saw, walking back to the splitter and so on.

Then I fire up the conveyor and the splitter and tear that pile down. The splits shove right off the table
and out of my way onto a huge pile that starts to season. I think you'll be surprised by how fast that table will fill up with splits. If done your way, you'll be running back and forth to put them on the pallet.

Like you, I started stacking on pallets. My thoughts were the same. I don't want to have to handle this stuff more then I have to. So I went out and got pallets and some green treated 2x4's to build boxes. The problem is, I had $20 into each box, not including my time, and the boxes only lasted 2 or 3 fills before they needed some rebuilding.
I still stack the wood, but I moved onto those metal totes bins. I found a local guy selling them for $25ea. These seem to be holding up a lot better. I still have some wood ones that survived, but they're getting to be fewer and fewer every year.

Anyway, after I split all the wood for the day, I go over and stack the totes.

It just seems to save a bunch of time if I concentrate on 1 task at a time. I can get into a groove and fly through each step.
 
I stack mine so I can move it from the drying area to the owb 1/2 a cord at a time. If I was selling wood, I'd grab scoops from the pile, fill the dump and deliver.
 
Thanks guys...I like all these ideas!!

In the past I usually dumped the wood into a giant pile right off the splitter (see pics next post). There have been two problems with doing that.

1) My woodlot is not all that big and is very shady with trees around me. When the pile gets to about 200 cords, I can no longer move equipment around efficiently cause there is wood and trees all around me. I want the wood moved to the open corn field adjacent to the woodpile after it is split (very sunny and breezy during the summer), but its about 200 yards away. I figured getting a pallet system going would be the best because I can carry two pallets at a time out there with the tractor. This year was unusually wet and the bottom logs on the pile got pretty nasty due to the lack of sun in that area. It makes for a great spot to work in the shade, just not for drying wood.

2) Also, for some reason I cant seem to get a good scoop of firewood out of the pile with either my FEL bucket or grapple to load the trailer. The bucket would get maybe 10 sticks. I resorted to throwing wood into the bucket, dumping it into the dump trailer, stacking it into the trailer, and then unloading the wood by hand at the customer's place. That's three or four times I have to bend down and pick up each stick individually in one day. That has to stop. BTW the dump trailer is a deck-over and the sides are 4 feet high. So throwing the wood almost 8 feet in the air into the trailer wasn't going to work either.

I talked to our town's metal fabricator shop and they can cut one side of the trailer off and make it hinge down, so I can load pallets in from the side, and lift the side back in place. The only thing I still have to figure out is how to get the pallets OFF the trailer at delivery. I have a another smaller tractor that can almost pick them up and a forklift that surely can, but I would rather use the tractor because the forklift has small wheels and might hang up going up a driveway. The plan is to use my brother-in-law's truck and my other car hauler trailer to follow behind me on deliveries. I want to just deliver the pallet and all and drop it off in their driveway, as if you would have ordered landscape stones or bricks. They can keep the pallet, it only cost me about $10 each to build, and I get $135 for the 1/2 cord pallet of wood. The savings in time and my back would be worth the $10, because remember it saved me from having to touch the wood at least 6 times. I know it sounds inefficient but this unloading by hand, trucking it around in a wheelbarrow, and stacking it once again has to stop.
 
I will say this about the TW, If thats all they got, I aint interested in owning one. Watching that round bow and twist the Hbeam, the 4way flopping up and down. Just to flimbsy for my use. I like the outfeed table, but thats about it.
 
once you have one you will never go back to toys splitters I have had many splitters over the years its the best one out their I also have a iron @Oak but don't used it at all its my 6th splitter I have had
 
Lucky,
here is a TW F/S local to me. Been on CL for about 4-5 mos. can't get rid of it. three have moved at 5-5.5k depending on condition.

http://cnj.craigslist.org/grd/4230715632.html
this one looks rid hard and put away wet.....but mostly left outside for an extended period of time. not too worn just not garage kept.

i wonder if it could be shipped by one of those "covered carriage" outfits that deliver fancy cars across the country ?
id help get it for you if you wanted.
 
In the end, isn't the idea of the pallet going to make you less efficient? Now you'll need two trucks, two trailers, two drivers and a piece of machinery to make ONE delivery. If it works, great. Just sounds like you're over complicating an existing "wheel" in a business with very tight profit margins. Does having the wood stacked give you an edge over the competition in your area?
 
In the end, isn't the idea of the pallet going to make you less efficient? Now you'll need two trucks, two trailers, two drivers and a piece of machinery to make ONE delivery. If it works, great. Just sounds like you're over complicating an existing "wheel" in a business with very tight profit margins. Does having the wood stacked give you an edge over the competition in your area?
well the good thing is that I already own the machinery except a high production splitter which is why I started this thread about. My biggest limitation on how much wood I can sell is time and my back. I physically cant deliver and stack more that 4 cords before it gets dark or my back starts to give out. I thought using a pallet system would allow me to deliver more wood to more people per day. It may not, thats why I asked the experts on this forum. I have sold wood since I was 14 and Im now almost 40, and yet I have had more great ideas from this forum than anywhere else. I was guess what I was wondering if anyone else found an efficient way to deliver wood using pallets. There has to be a better way to do this than to pick up each piece so many times.
 
well the good thing is that I already own the machinery except a high production splitter which is why I started this thread about. My biggest limitation on how much wood I can sell is time and my back. I physically cant deliver and stack more that 4 cords before it gets dark or my back starts to give out. I thought using a pallet system would allow me to deliver more wood to more people per day. It may not, thats why I asked the experts on this forum. I have sold wood since I was 14 and Im now almost 40, and yet I have had more great ideas from this forum than anywhere else. I was guess what I was wondering if anyone else found an efficient way to deliver wood using pallets. There has to be a better way to do this than to pick up each piece so many times.



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This goes back to reinventing the wheel,

Stacking for the buyer has to be eliminated unless you charge extra.

The only way you will become more efficient is to sell the fire wood by the
ton or by the thrown cord in bulk using a conveyor without stacking or using pallets.

I strongly suggest to you that you contact redprospector via PM and talk to him about his chomper
firewood processor and what he does with it.

The chomper has a six second cycle time for 12 inch long blocks the Timberwolf TW5 (now
a manual machine) is slower.

The chomper shears the firewood and it dries faster than split wood.

You are at the point where you get bigger or get out.

you neeed to add a brush grapple attachment for your tractors loader to pick up the dumped splits
or to simply move the logs to a chomper if you go that route.

You need a much bigger scoop bucket to gather the splits

this is why I suggested the grapple bucket attachment you will have ot add a third valve attachment to use one.


Using your dump trailer and loading with a small firewood conveyor off the chomper will be much more efficient
even using the basic simplex 14 gas powered model.


I would rather see you sell the firewood in bulk by the ton or the thrown cord which eliminates stacking period

a throw cord is considered 165 cubic feet.

YOU have to examine this using a decision tree to make the decision.


I am trying to help you succceed not fail


You have to eliminate the labor as much as possible and the chomper and a
firewood conveyor eliminates much of the labor for you
 
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