Chainsaw advice

vtsnowedin · Post by **vtsnowedin** » 07 Dec 2011, 21:48

When gas gets to $100 per gallon I will still burn five gallons of it through my chain saw to cut my winters wood. Axe , bow saw and crosscut saw will get used when there is no gas to be had at any price. Not that I wouldn't limb out a top with a sharp double bitted axe to save gas and noise but blocking large logs with a two man saw is a lot of work and a chain saw returns a nice profit on the fuel invested.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 07 Dec 2011, 21:50

I don't get through five litres in a year with my chainsaw. Five gallons. That's one long winter.

snow hope · Post by **snow hope** » 07 Dec 2011, 22:11

I have chosen not to buy a chain-saw, but to cut all my wood with bow-saws. The off-cuts and pallets I get are cut with ordinary wood-saws.

I have produced all my wood that I burn for 3 winters in a row now. I need 5 wood stackers to do me a winter, which from memory is just under a cord of wood.

Good for the heart muscle, especially for someone who enjoys their food and beer!

PS Congratulations on passing your exam Mike.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 07 Dec 2011, 22:21

I'm doing the same (on a somewhat smaller scale) but it's knackering and there isn't very much of me!

vtsnowedin · Post by **vtsnowedin** » 08 Dec 2011, 02:41

emordnilap wrote:I don't get through five litres in a year with my chainsaw. Five gallons. That's one long winter.

You have that right. 200 days of heating season and ten solid cords of good hard wood might not be enough. The five gallons might be a bit fuzzy though as I haven't kept exact track as the same jug feeds : lawn mower, rototiller, wood splitter, beater 4x4 wood truck , four wheeler and the mixed jug for the saw.
I sure am going to miss gasoline when it gets too expensive.

vtsnowedin · Post by **vtsnowedin** » 08 Dec 2011, 02:55

snow hope wrote:I have chosen not to buy a chain-saw, but to cut all my wood with bow-saws. The off-cuts and pallets I get are cut with ordinary wood-saws.

I have produced all my wood that I burn for 3 winters in a row now. I need 5 wood stackers to do me a winter, which from memory is just under a cord of wood.

Good for the heart muscle, especially for someone who enjoys their food and beer!

If you can get by on a single cord a year then you have a very small and very efficient house and your local climate doesn't visit you with many days of forty below. The future will probably move me in your direction with closing off space that doesn't need to be heated and bringing all that needs to be heated up to the highest practical standard but I don't expect that where I live I can get to less then three cords per year.

snow hope · Post by **snow hope** » 08 Dec 2011, 13:12

Hey VT, I wish you were right, but the big difference is we don't usually get more than 10c below freezing and often get 5 or 10c above freezing!

Very mild winter climate over here.

Plus that wood is just for my wood stove which heats my main sitting room - no hot water linked, so no rads either.

Unfortunately I am forced to use oil for heating the rads in my little part of the world. One day I will get a solid fuel boiler and storage tank (when the price becomes more sensible) and then my cord usage will go up considerably.

At this stage, I will consider a chain-saw.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 08 Dec 2011, 15:47

Isn't the Gulf Stream marvellous

!!

Potemkin Villager · Post by **Potemkin Villager** » 08 Dec 2011, 16:21

vtsnowedin wrote:
emordnilap wrote:I don't get through five litres in a year with my chainsaw. Five gallons. That's one long winter.
you have that right. 200 days of heating season and ten solid cords of good hard wood ......... beater 4x4 wood truck .......I sure am going to miss gasoline when it gets too expensive.

What on earth is a "beater 4x4 wood truck"? Don't tell me it has
a 4.2 litre V8 engine.

vtsnowedin · Post by **vtsnowedin** » 08 Dec 2011, 23:44

Roger Adair wrote:
vtsnowedin wrote:
emordnilap wrote:I don't get through five litres in a year with my chainsaw. Five gallons. That's one long winter.
you have that right. 200 days of heating season and ten solid cords of good hard wood ......... beater 4x4 wood truck .......I sure am going to miss gasoline when it gets too expensive.
What on earth is a "beater 4x4 wood truck"? Don't tell me it has
a 4.2 litre V8 engine.

A beater in Vermont is a car or truck you buy to use in the winter to save the good car your still making payments on. These are well seasoned vehicles that you buy for cash at around $1000 or so then get it sharp shod and through the safety inspection in the fall. If you wreck it all your out is the $1000 bucks plus whatever you had to do to get it inspected. With that limit on your potential loss you can "drive it like you stole it "and make it all the way home. If you can't make it up the hill in a snow storm you can do a VT turn around. ( Gas it backwards to about 10 miles per hour then stomp on the brakes as you spin the wheel to the right planting your rear bumper in the snowbank and swinging the front end 180 degrees around and pointed back down hill in the tracks you made coming up. ) HRH has successfully done this with a sixty passenger school bus.

My "beater wood truck" is a Ford Ranger that had well over 200,000 miles on it when I bought it for $900. I drove it for two years and it now has better then 250K on it. (V6 4x4 standard 4.0 liter engine.) I couldn't trust it to take me to work for another year so retired it to the woodlot. You can throw blocks of cord wood in the back and not worry about how they fall and you can turn tight enough around a tree so you scrape down the whole side of the load bed and not give a fig as long as you don't get hung up between a stump and a tree and need a tractor to twitch you off. (only done that once this year).

snow hope · Post by **snow hope** » 08 Dec 2011, 23:56

What a different world......

JohnB · Post by **JohnB** » 09 Dec 2011, 07:39

I can't even get a vehicle into my woodlot! It's a wheelbarrow, in some places a four wheel handcart, or carry stuff out by hand

.

vtsnowedin · Post by **vtsnowedin** » 09 Dec 2011, 11:11

JohnB wrote:I can't even get a vehicle into my woodlot! It's a wheelbarrow, in some places a four wheel handcart, or carry stuff out by hand .

Wet , rocky ,or too steeply sloped is the reason most woodlands are woods and not fields. I have all of those but by choosing my path carefully I can get within 200 feet or less of most trees . Some of the old haul roads date back to when we were skidding out logs with horses. If it's just to thick to get through then you have the technology to fix that. No reason any two trees need to be closer then ten feet of each other so if the truck won't fit between them cut the inferior of the two off flush.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 09 Dec 2011, 11:36

VT I think you might have not taken into account the sheer difference in size between a typical UK and VT wood-lot

Post by **mikepepler** » 09 Dec 2011, 17:23

I reckon we've got through about 20 litres of fuel a year on chainsaws so far, but that's been cutting way more than what we need ourselves - last year we cut enough wood to keep us going for 3 years. Now that we've mostly stopped selling to others and have our 'seasoning pipeline' full we can slow down a bit.

I won't deny that there is a petrol-head segment among chainsaw users, and I even succumb myself sometimes, but from sheer amazement/delight at how fast a sharp chainsaw can cut and knowing from experience how long it would have taken with a bow saw. I reckon that using a chainsaw lets you produce wood at something like ten times the rate of doing it with hand tools, perhaps more. As a result, I would be prepared to pay £20-30/litre for petrol for a chainsaw, because each litre of fuel can easily turn into one or two solid cubic metres of wood. Perhaps there'd be a chainsaw-equivalent of eco-driving then though? e.g. sharpening more often, not leaving the saw running, snedding with a billhook instead... (p.s. I do have axes and bow saws as well, just in case things do go downhill quickly!)

On the topic of heating demand, we insulated our cavity walls, topped up the loft and added solar water at the same time as we got the woodburner installed. Next step is to insulate the inaccessible cavities in our roof created by the dormer windows, and also the small area of flat roof and vertical wall associated with these as well. After that we're on to external wall insulation, but that costs a packet so it may be some time. I'm waiting to see how the Green Deal pans out in case it's worth using to get some of this work done, but might make a start on the inaccessible cavities before then anyway...