Does your back hurt from bending over to buck firewood on the ground? Can you admit that occasionally you cut too far and run your newly filed chain into the dirt? Do you spend too long…
Tricks of the Trade
Tricks of the Trade: Wooden Felling Wedges
Not to endorse stereotypes too much, but I’m a card-carrying cheap Scot. As I walk through the local farm and forestry supply store, my mind instantly wanders to question, “how…
Tricks of the Trade: Building With Cordwood
The first time I saw cordwood construction was in high school when I shadowed a consulting forester for career day. His home office was made of cordwood and provided me with my first forestry…
Tricks of the Trade: Tools and Techniques for Splitting Firewood
I was recently in a big-box farm-supply store and saw a large sign that read, “Wood Chopping Headquarters.” What they meant, of course, was not chopping, but splitting.…
Tricks of the Trade: Make Your Own Choker Chain
Owning just a single choker chain is a lot like having one Crescent wrench in your toolbox. Sure, you can get the job done, but it would be a lot more efficient (and enjoyable) if you had a…
Woodpile Wisdom: How It All Stacks Up
In 2013, The New York Times ran a story exposing a Scandinavian controversy that has divided Norwegians (and New Englanders) for eons. The question centered around the proper way to stack…
Tricks of the Trade: The D-Log
In college, I spent a summer building hand-hewn Adirondack lean-tos. The work required both precision and persuasion. We’d chisel perfect saddle notches, which often meant rolling the…
Tricks of the Trade: Living Fenceposts
Fenceposts have always baffled me. Why would anyone take a perfectly good tree, cut it down, dig a hole to set it in, and then spend the next 20 years watching it decay? In my early days of…
Tricks of the Trade: Small-Scale Charcoal Production
After bucking this year’s firewood, I found myself with a collection of odd-shaped ends and crotches, perfect for charcoal-making. Charcoal is essentially wood that’s been…
Tricks of the Trade: The Perfect Splitting Block
Wood-splitting is a rural pastime rooted in tradition and experience – experience that’s often measured in broken axe handles and creative curses directed at knotty chunks of…
Tricks of the Trade: Peavey Proficiency
In the last installment of Tricks of the Trade, we examined the venerable peavey, and offered several modifications to make an already invaluable tool even handier. Now it’s time to head…
Tricks of the Trade: Building a Better Peavey
While the mighty axe rightly receives credit for felling most of the timber of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the peavey that took the work out of moving these logs, on both…
Coppicing for Firewood
Of all the silvicultural techniques available to forest owners, perhaps no method is more underused than coppicing. Coppicing is a reproduction method where a tree is cut back periodically to…
Big Tree, Small Bar
Is longer better when it comes to chainsaw bars? Personally, I like a shorter bar. It allows me to use a saw with a smaller engine, which reduces overall strain on my back and muscles. Plus,…
Building a Lumber Pile
The demise of the local sawmill has been closely followed by the rise of the sawyer with a portable bandsaw mill. Usually the sawyer will come to your house, set the mill up parallel to your…
Saw Sharpening Tips
Chainsaws, despite their blunt appearance, are precision tools that need to be carefully maintained to work properly. The chain is no exception to the rule. There are two parts to maintain on…
Scribing a Saddle Notch
If you’re considering building a log structure, you’ll need to learn to scribe logs. In most cases, you’ll be scribing for a saddle notch, used to join two logs…
Tricks of the Trade: Freeing a hung tree
When felling trees, Plan A has the tree falling right where you want it to go. Once you hang one up, though - and even the best of us do - the game changes and it's time for Plan B. If…
Buying a Chainsaw
Chainsaws are powerful tools, and you’ll work more quickly, safely, and efficiently if you own a good one. But with all the options out there, buying a chainsaw can be an overwhelming…
Make Your Own Vacuum Booster
Vacuum tubing systems have revolutionized maple sugar production, and more and more sugarmakers are getting into the game, drawn by the allure of making an average of .4 gallons of syrup per…