Slabwood processing

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7sleeper

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This is my try on showing how I process slab wood directly from the sawmill. Many people like my fil are rather old and not very handy any more(after 2 heartattachs & 2 strokes no wonder!) so they use the chance of getting slabwood very cheap from the sawmill's around the area. This is in the southern alpine region of Austria so Beech, Oak or similar is a rarity. Out of the softwoods Larch(or Tamarack) is a very good type of wood so if you can get it, do it. Luckily he has been able to aquire 6 bundles of slabwood from a local mill and had this delivered to his property. Each bundle is approx. 6 meters long and 1 meter in diameter (we are metric over here ;) ).
I will try to chronicly show how I, in my limited time, make his firewood for the winter.

1. The bundles are delivered

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2. I cut directly off the bundles 1 meter long pieces for stacking. You can see it in the rear bundle.

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3. After laying down some stones to keep the wood of the ground, we lay down the 4 m long pieces and stack criss cross at both ends. In the middle we just fill up with the rest.

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4. Fastforward on year later. The wood is nice and dry. Now I simply get on to the pile and saw right down the filed up middle parts of the wood pile. Not into the criss cross ends. I cut them twice to get them approx. 33cm long. they then fit best into the firewood processor. It happens sometimes since you are standing on the wood pile that the saw is pinched by the wood being cut but that hasn't been a major problem for me so far. The video is made with a mobile phone so the quality isn't that good.



5. This is how it looks like after you take down the first&second third. I simply chop it by hand and throw it into the trailer. I don't need the trailer because we just use the wheelbarrow for getting around the hedge but I don't like bending down so often handling the same piece of wood. :laugh:

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6. For the end stacks we use this construction I have seen here in german chainsaw threads. The wood is stacked approx. 1.5m high and I equally just cut down thirds and chop them up. The boss ;). She doesn't want to be recognized!

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I hope that this might help some people here. Or maybe someone will show me a better way to optimize my system.

greetings from Austria

7
 
Any reason you split your pieces so small? That looks like kindling to me, not firewood. If you load your stove full of those small splits can you get an overnight burn?
 
Any reason you split your pieces so small? That looks like kindling to me, not firewood. If you load your stove full of those small splits can you get an overnight burn?

boostnut, that seems to be the norm over there. They like their wood smaller. I dunno why. I've been moving in the other direction - using bigger wood.


With slabwood like this, though, there's not much choice!
 
Dont walk off the back of that pile:poke:

:laugh:

boostnut, that seems to be the norm over there. They like their wood smaller. I dunno why. I've been moving in the other direction - using bigger wood.

With slabwood like this, though, there's not much choice!

That is not the norm over here. As mentioned earlier it was the wood for my FIL. I donot want to know how big the wood is going to be you are carrying around after 2 heart attacks & 2 strokes!
As usual over here the houses are quite well insulated so humongous amounts of wood are not needed. Further we have here something known in the US as russian oven. We fire it up only 2x per day, once in the morning and once at night, and have it warm all day&night.
OWB are not an option over here since they are rather inefficient. When I see how much wood you throw into an OWB, we could heat a week with that amount of wood! We use wood gasifiers, open or closed furnaces or russian ovens (in a traditional setting).
So if you need so much wood I would reconsider the insulation of your house. It should pay for itself in a few years.

7
 
out of curiosity what is the cost (American dollar equivalent )of one of these bundles ??? i would likely pay 10 bucks for each one of those here.the hardwood bundles here are tightly bound and around 4 meters long and 2 across- works out to 3/4 of a cord.i think the differences in wood use is alot like alot of things in our country such as gasoline and the like .basically .we do things in excess because thats what we are used to and we have an abundance of what we need for resources here and dont care about peak efficiency as much plus alot of our houses/dwellings are over 3,000 sq feet where a stand alone stove unit wont cut it.must be a europe thing cause that wood does look like kindling.. for me anyways ..everything has its place ..nice thing is an owb can heat multiple buildings like your spa ,swimming pool and garage ..the mess is all outside and can be loaded once per day also they (owb) can potentially heat over 6,000 sq feet.not my thing but for some i can see how it would work great
 
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I think you'd find much of Europe is much more mild in winter compared to North America at the same latitude.

Austria & Germany are roughly the same as Michigan & Ontario, but their winter temps are more like the upper south -- Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia. Probably a bit more stable -- doesn't get as cold when it gets cold, but doesn't get as mild as often either.

France & UK are even milder due to the ocean, much like the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. being far warmer then the east coast.

Much of Scandinavia lies as far north as the northern borders of the main Canadian provinces, but have temperatures much more in line with Minnesota / Michigan / Maine.
 
Trying to fix the thread but haven't found the pictures yet.

7

Just wanted to thank you for making the effort. This site lost a lot of good threads because of the picture purge, good to see people putting it back together.



Mr. HE:cool:
 

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