Further to my first post from my holidays that covered as much if not more of the aftermath of a tornado landing near my cottage while I was on holidays as outright lumberjack activities, I have put together this post … to concentrate on the rest of the “I’m a lumberjack …” (here’s my archive) part of the story which I had left to the implied, as in “well of course I cut up all that wood and piled it up in my wood shed.”
The first part of this story is to tell about my chainsaw: I have a Husqvarna 55cc gas powered chainsaw that was a Christmas gift from about 2007. After the usual question of “What do you want for Christmas”, I was initially told that a chainsaw was a bit too expensive an ask — an answer I completely knew, and which I fully expected to receive — so I followed up with “a beer concentrate kit and a wine concentrate kit” instead. When I was asked again a couple of weeks later about “What do you want for Christmas?” I responded with “I already told you!” meaning, in my mind, the beer kit and the wine kit. Was I ever surprised on Christmas morning!
During the initial cleanup of the fallen tree across the road after the tornado, I took out my chainsaw for the first time in the season, started it up, and helped cut up the tree — of course, to help clear the road and allow people to pass. A couple of days later during further cleanup operations, my chainsaw wouldn’t start up. I went through opening up the chainsaw and doing some cleaning with a neighbour the next day, and we used some high-flammability spray directly into the air intake to test the unit again. I even spent a morning the day after that hunting down a new spark plug for my chainsaw — the unit still wouldn’t start up. Yet another couple of days after that, I hunted down a local small engine tool repair shop, and left the chainsaw there along with said neighbour’s chainsaw for servicing — for an estimated turnaround time of “around up to two weeks.” Sigh, so much for my lumberjack dreams during my holidays being dashed.
A few days later, I was back in Montreal for a quick trip to the dentist for a planned teeth cleaning, and I realized that — given that on the battery powered side of power tools, I use Ryobi tools — a big box store that distributes Ryobi was a mere few blocks away from the dentist’s office. I went there, got the least expensive weed whacker for the Ryobi 18V battery system (finally, Mom will be happy that the lawn edges will be done!) and I had designs on a Ryobi 10″ chainsaw for the Ryobi 40V batteries I own. Note that the idea wasn’t to replace the 55cc Husqvarna chainsaw, just to have a convenient to use tool for smaller jobs — which, frankly, is a lot of what I do with a chainsaw to begin with. After hunting down the 10″ chainsaw in the store, while going to the checkout, I passed by a display of Ryobi tools on sale. There was a 14″ chainsaw that came with a 40V x 4Ah battery and charger that was deeply discounted for about $75ish more than the regular price on the 10″ tool only chainsaw.
So I purchased the 14″ unit instead, obviously. In the process, I became pleased with myself and my good luck; much as I like the 14″ model, it is just at and arguably even noticeably below the lower end of my occasional heavy-duty needs. As such, I know that I would have regretted having purchased the 10″ model, even had I never discovered the deeply discounted sale.
So back at the cottage, I eventually faced my pile of wood to cut up again, which I had shown at the end of the previous post about the tornado:
The pile of wood was cut up, and to my pleasant surprise, about as easily as with my gas powered chainsaw, perhaps even more so:
This used up just short of a full charge from one of my Ryobi 40V 7.5Ah battery from my lawnmower.
At this point, I already had ideas brewing in my head to go get the cut up eight foot log section leftover from the fallen tree across the road after the tornado because the lead person clearing up the wood and the road wasn’t interested in this piece; its centre was rotten enough, and therefore wouldn’t have provided, in his estimation, more than one or two planks of wood for the effort:
At the same time, there was an old very dead tree partly left standing, and partly knocked over but still precariously standing up several feet away, both parts of which I also decided to retrieve and cut up:
I proceeded to cut up the eight foot log and the dead tree, and I got about half a cut through the eight foot log which was about a foot and a half thick from the end of the charge in the 7.5Ah battery in the chainsaw. The operation, involving cutting the log eight foot log into eight pieces, and the knocked over dead tree into transportable lengths of roughly four fireplace sized logs, went through the full charge of the 4Ah battery that came with the chainsaw, the full charge from another 7.5Ah battery, and “one light”‘s worth (out of four) from the other 7.5Ah battery that had been recharged in the meantime. I also had to sharpen the chain, using a manual file with a fixed sharpening guide.
All of the wood was loaded into my car, effectively replicating a similar photo from the previous tornado post.
(As an aside: Am I still going to contact Toyota with pictures to tell them one of the ways I use my 2012 manual transmission Toyota Matrix? Who knows? I’m still quite enjoying making the blog posts!)
The wood in the car was transported all of perhaps 100 feet to the side of the cottage where I was working, and unloaded from the car:
The first thing I did next was to cut up the branches and the logs that I had collected:
At this point I should mention that last summer when I was playing lumberjack, our handyman with whom we are also just plain friendly stopped by and noticed all the wood to be split, and offered to lend me his six-ton electric wood splitter, with a comment to the effect of “you’ll never want to go back to splitting wood with an axe!” Sure enough, he was right, and over the winter, he sent me a link by email for a five ton electric wood splitter that had a substantially discounted sale price compared to its regular price; I immediately purchased a unit.
Fast forward to this past week, I had the necessary testing grounds for another one of my new toys; at this point, the new wood splitter was taken out, and I started splitting some logs:
While I was learning how to use the unit, since it had been a year since I’d used the borrowed splitter, and that my splitter operates slightly differently from our handyman’s unit, I discovered the joys of having to hold down the power button with one hand while operating the ram lever with the other hand. This process essentially requires one to either to crouch down to ground level and use a support for one arm to balance oneself — in my case, one of the logs cut from the tree trunk fallen during the tornado — or, a hypothetical situation of lifting the “I have no idea how heavy this back-breakingly heavy beast is” to a level at which I’d be able to stand while operating it, and which would therefore require commensurately higher lifting of the logs to be split.
After splitting seven of the eight pieces from the roadside, I decided to start piling the wood to clear space for more wood to be split:
I piled said split wood on my woodpile, beginning with some of the cut up branches at the top of the third row:
… and then beginning a fourth row of split wood:
Of course here is a photo of the work area, showing that the split logs from the roadside tree trunk had been moved away:
I continued splitting all the logs of wood until I ran out, only having a few hard-to-split or otherwise odd logs left over:
I also continued to pile the split wood until I ended up finishing the fourth row of wood:
I even had so much wood to pile that I started a fifth row with the rest of the cut up branches and the hard-to-split pieces, waiting for the next time:
Of course, having piled up all the wood, the work area was cleared, only leaving behind some scraps to be cleaned up another time:
Here’s an overall view on the back of the wood shed:
And of course a view of the side where you can see that all four rows are filled up:
Now I just have to go to the cottage often enough this coming winter to burn through hopefully a row and a half, or more, of wood from the woodpile in the wood burning stove to heat the cottage!
… And that all still leaves me with the birch trees I was originally figuring I’d be cutting up over my holidays this summer:
Depending on when I get my gas chainsaw back, when I get up to the cottage again this summer and fall, and a bunch of other “ifs” and “whens”, I may end up cutting up some of those tree trunks this fall and pulling them out of the woods to winter and spring in hopefully slightly less wet and marshy conditions, ready for next summer.
And did I really get to play lumberjack in the end? My aching legs, hips and lower back certainly think I did!
And yes, “I’m okay!” with that! (here’s my archive)