I have to start by saying sorry (sort of) to all my woodworking buddies. I know you’ll all cringe when I tell you I sourced a massive Silver Maple and am bucking it up to be used for firewood. The sad part for me was I learned about it too late to save all the limbs that were 24″ or less, they were run through a chipper!
I still managed to fill a 20′ container and have it delivered to the farm.
This photo of the mega crane dropping those 4500 lb hunks of wood into our bin will give you an idea of the size of this monster. The pieces in the photos are about 7′ tall and almost 5′ across! You should have felt the ground shake when the driver dumped the container.
Once on the farm we had to figure out how to slice the trunk into manageable pieces. My great little Dolmar that I usually use just wasn’t going to handle this job. I managed to get my hands on a STIHL 880, with a 36″ blade and a brand new chain. That saw didn’t even slow down through the nastiest of knots. Man was that fun!
We tried to keep the rounds about 22″ and even those weigh in at over 400 lbs each.
It takes two of us to get those rounds onto the splitter. But let me tell you, once there, our Iron Fist 31 Ton Splitter is worth its weight in gold. It pushes through those rounds like butter, horizontally or vertically, it doesn’t waver at all. We haven’t quite finished splitting it all but so far there is well over two cords of wood.
The Silver Maple had a canopy of well over 100′, I have to wonder how much firewood that tree could have provided if not for the chipper.
We have a good stockpile of firewood for this year already. The Silver Maple will be nice and hard for next winter. I know the sun is still shining and it’s nice and warm outside, but part of me can’t wait for the first fire of this fall.
