HEATING
How to make winter firewood
W
ith Gauteng nights
ranging from cold,
to bitterly cold
householders' thoughts turn
to how best to heat their
dwellings, and smallholders
are no exception … although
we have an advantage over
city dwellers in this regard in
that many of us have a
plentiful supply of free
firewood, as a result of tree
pruning and felling activities
on our land.
However,
getting a tree
or limb
from
felling stage to firewood takes
a certain amount of effort,
and requires certain tools.
The result, though, a neat and
plentiful woodpile, is a
pleasure to behold and gives
one a feeling of great
satisfaction.
Here are some pointers as to
how best to make a woodpile
for winter with the least
effort.
Unless you are a sucker for
punishment and want to
spend hours sweating over a
bowsaw, you will need a
chainsaw, probably with a
couple of spare chains, but
Logsplitters: Left ~ long-handled splitter from Husqvarna.
Right ~ small 5-ton electric splitter can be used vertically or horizontally
definitely with the usual
safety gear of helmet and
face-screen, gloves, proper
footwear and safety trousers.
For cutting up firewood a
small, lightweight unit with a
35-50cm cutting bar is
adequate.
You will also need some
means to split the resultant
logs into manageable,
burnable pieces ~ either a
long-handled log splitting axe
or a hydraulic or electric log
splitter machine. The latter
will become almost essential
if you are producing a large
quantity of firewood for, say,
a guest lodge or a
number of
cottages.
If you use a
hand axe you
will also need
a sturdy
cutting
block. This
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can be the sturdiest part of
the tree trunk, cut level top
and bottom, to about thigh
height, and anchored into the
ground with metal poles to
stop it from moving around.
Make it thigh height so that
you aren't bending down
each time to pick up and
position the bit you're
splitting, and yet not too high
that the full force of your
stroke with the axe is not
maximised.
Now assuming you have
felled a dead tree, the most
efficient way of preparing it
for the fire is to cut it once,
where it fell, into grate size
lengths, then move these little
bits of wood to near your
wood pile, and split them
there. You will therefore
spend longer cutting up wood
“in situ” where the tree fell,
but you will thus avoid
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