RedNeckGeek
Super Member
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2011
- Messages
- 8,746
- Location
- Butte County & Orcutt, California
- Tractor
- Kubota M62, Kubota L3240D HST (SOLD!), Kubota RTV900
This is the fifth installment on the Ariens 22 ton log splitter I purchased back in 2014 and used then to put up about ten cords of firewood. Here I find myself in the middle of winter in 2021 with only a pallet and a half of wood left. The big Knack box full of kindling chips I'd collected back in '14 ran out last year, and I'd stooped to using a Kindling Kracker on old pallets to keep the home fires lit.
It was time to roll the Ariens splitter out and give it, and me, some exercise. I always make a point to use only ethanol free gasoline in the small engines around here, and always run them dry before they get put away. That's all I'd done to the splitter back in '14, the last time I used it, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I started yanking on the starter cord. With a tank of fresh E0, it fired right up on the third pull and settled into an even idle as soon as I took off the choke. I let it run long enough to get warm, then shut it down to change the oil and blow out the air filter. I made a little ramp out of aluminum foil to fit under the drain hole, and this time got most of the oil in the catch pan instead of all over the bottom of the splitter.
I was all set, all except for the pallets. For years, every time I pulled the tarp off the stack to bring a fresh pallet up to the house, I'd have to make repairs to the 2x4 hoops that held the wood in place. Near as I can figure, the wind blowing across the tarp had flexed the drywall screws that held the hoops together, causing them to break. Sometimes I got lucky and could force the ends back together and shoot in a new pair of screws, but usually I'd have to pull wood off the pallet to get the ends back into alignment, then stack it all back on there. The pallets themselves weren't in great shape, either, some having rotted, some had been subject to some rough handling by my clumsy efforts with the pallet forks. There's a pallet yard in town with sky high stacks of pallets for sale, most of them wood. But they also had a couple dozen plastic pallets. They weren't in the best shape, either, having cracks and missing chunks in spots, and they'd gotten a bit brittle over the years from sunlight exposure. But at three bux a piece they'd still be better than what I had left at home.
I'd also found a place that was giving away steel pallets they'd received with their recreational vehicle shipments. They measured 5' x 10' and were made from steel rectangular tubing. Using a borrowed car trailer, I could drag ten of 'em home at a time, and over a few years had a pile of a couple dozen of 'em. The plan was to make a frame on top of the plastic pallet that would be strong enough to let me stack two of 'em high. I'd use the same pair of hoops, but steel this time, and connected to each other at the top and bottom with rails that would hook to the pallets and feed loads into the ground so the pallets wouldn't shatter. Each steel pallet took about an hour with an angle grinder and zip blade to get it apart, and another couple hours to cut into appropriate sized pieces and weld together. Before attaching the pallet, I used a circular saw to cut the bottoms out of the two fork tunnels so I could get a pallet jack under them more easily.
In 2016 the Saddle Fire jumped across the canyon and came with a couple hundred feet of the house before it choked itself out on a rock ledge. I watched a pair of houses and an Airstream burn across the canyon, and was up all night with a pair of firefighters and their pumper truck waiting for the flames that thankfully never came. The next morning, it seemed like I had every fireman in the county coming down my driveway to try and see where the fire was, and not long after that a bulldozer showed up and started cutting fire lines. Only problem was they left the house on the fire side of the line, but when I pointed this out to the crew chief, he was only to happy to drive another line where it would do some good. Not only that, he had the operator push trees and brush another hundred feet across the west and south property lines, down into the state park where I wasn't able to go. In the process they pushed up a huge pile of mostly manzanita wood, which itself was something of a fire hazard.
The next day, an excavator showed up along with a crew of inmate laborors, and between the two they pulled the wood out of the piles, cut it into lengths the inmates could move, and made another pile far enough from the house so as not to be a problem. Then a conservation officer showed up from the state park, and she had them spreading the firewood out across the barren ground that had just been created by the bulldozer! She insisted it was to control erosion during the winter rains. I felt like my house was being set up to be burned at the stake, and we had a big argument about the location of the property line because I refused to let them pile wood on my ground. I didn't put up too much of a fuss, and after the dust settled, a neighbor and I gathered up all that wood and made another pile in an easier to get to place. I figure it was at least another ten cords of wood. The photo above was taken about half way through the move.
Fast forward another couple years, and in November of 2018 the Camp Fire came for a visit after it finished barbecuing the town of Paradise. I was lucky enough to still have a house to come home to after they lifted the evacuation orders, but it burned every square inch of property outside a 40' ring around the house. My palletized wood survived under a close fitting tarp, but the only sign of all that manzanita we'd worked so hard to move was an inch thick layer of ash where it had been piled.
Crews had also dropped hundreds of trees along the road into my place, and nobody seemed to want them. I spent weeks with the tractor hauling them home, replacing that manzanita stack with one even larger, but mainly of oak. The winters were mild enough and I had other more pressing issues, so that wood sat until last year before I did anything more with it. Once it cooled off, I got it all bucked up into 18" lengths, put the tarp back on, and started looking for a way to provide more permanent storage. I wanted something steel, and something that would seal tight enough to keep embers out. The answer was a shipping container, one with doors on both ends so I could use most of it for firewood and still have room at the other end for the splitter.
In the photo above, to the left you can see a stack of the steel pallets I mentioned earlier.
This past summer of 2020, California had the worst fire season ever. Twice over a month period, wildfire once again got within a few miles of the house, and all that wood was still sitting out in the breeze. Once it cooled off enough to work outside again, it was time to start fabrication on those steel reinforced plastic pallets and get to splitting again.
I got to cuttin' and a weldin' and soon had my first two knocked out. The photo above shows them stacked, which is when I realized the top and bottom rails need to go the full width of the pallet to provide stability. And the first time I tried to lift a loaded pair of them, I realized the plastic in the bottom one wasn't strong enough to lift the top one through the four bolts that attached the hoops. So two more lengths of tube got welded in between the hoops across the bottom of each pallet.
And that pretty much brings us up to date. So far I've got eight pallets worth of wood shoehorned into the container, and I figure there's room for about 16 more. There's a freshly cut up steel pallet in the garage just waiting on me to cut them to length and weld up some more hoops. If I can get away from this keyboard soon enough, I might even get some more wood split today.
It was time to roll the Ariens splitter out and give it, and me, some exercise. I always make a point to use only ethanol free gasoline in the small engines around here, and always run them dry before they get put away. That's all I'd done to the splitter back in '14, the last time I used it, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I started yanking on the starter cord. With a tank of fresh E0, it fired right up on the third pull and settled into an even idle as soon as I took off the choke. I let it run long enough to get warm, then shut it down to change the oil and blow out the air filter. I made a little ramp out of aluminum foil to fit under the drain hole, and this time got most of the oil in the catch pan instead of all over the bottom of the splitter.
I was all set, all except for the pallets. For years, every time I pulled the tarp off the stack to bring a fresh pallet up to the house, I'd have to make repairs to the 2x4 hoops that held the wood in place. Near as I can figure, the wind blowing across the tarp had flexed the drywall screws that held the hoops together, causing them to break. Sometimes I got lucky and could force the ends back together and shoot in a new pair of screws, but usually I'd have to pull wood off the pallet to get the ends back into alignment, then stack it all back on there. The pallets themselves weren't in great shape, either, some having rotted, some had been subject to some rough handling by my clumsy efforts with the pallet forks. There's a pallet yard in town with sky high stacks of pallets for sale, most of them wood. But they also had a couple dozen plastic pallets. They weren't in the best shape, either, having cracks and missing chunks in spots, and they'd gotten a bit brittle over the years from sunlight exposure. But at three bux a piece they'd still be better than what I had left at home.
I'd also found a place that was giving away steel pallets they'd received with their recreational vehicle shipments. They measured 5' x 10' and were made from steel rectangular tubing. Using a borrowed car trailer, I could drag ten of 'em home at a time, and over a few years had a pile of a couple dozen of 'em. The plan was to make a frame on top of the plastic pallet that would be strong enough to let me stack two of 'em high. I'd use the same pair of hoops, but steel this time, and connected to each other at the top and bottom with rails that would hook to the pallets and feed loads into the ground so the pallets wouldn't shatter. Each steel pallet took about an hour with an angle grinder and zip blade to get it apart, and another couple hours to cut into appropriate sized pieces and weld together. Before attaching the pallet, I used a circular saw to cut the bottoms out of the two fork tunnels so I could get a pallet jack under them more easily.
In 2016 the Saddle Fire jumped across the canyon and came with a couple hundred feet of the house before it choked itself out on a rock ledge. I watched a pair of houses and an Airstream burn across the canyon, and was up all night with a pair of firefighters and their pumper truck waiting for the flames that thankfully never came. The next morning, it seemed like I had every fireman in the county coming down my driveway to try and see where the fire was, and not long after that a bulldozer showed up and started cutting fire lines. Only problem was they left the house on the fire side of the line, but when I pointed this out to the crew chief, he was only to happy to drive another line where it would do some good. Not only that, he had the operator push trees and brush another hundred feet across the west and south property lines, down into the state park where I wasn't able to go. In the process they pushed up a huge pile of mostly manzanita wood, which itself was something of a fire hazard.
The next day, an excavator showed up along with a crew of inmate laborors, and between the two they pulled the wood out of the piles, cut it into lengths the inmates could move, and made another pile far enough from the house so as not to be a problem. Then a conservation officer showed up from the state park, and she had them spreading the firewood out across the barren ground that had just been created by the bulldozer! She insisted it was to control erosion during the winter rains. I felt like my house was being set up to be burned at the stake, and we had a big argument about the location of the property line because I refused to let them pile wood on my ground. I didn't put up too much of a fuss, and after the dust settled, a neighbor and I gathered up all that wood and made another pile in an easier to get to place. I figure it was at least another ten cords of wood. The photo above was taken about half way through the move.
Fast forward another couple years, and in November of 2018 the Camp Fire came for a visit after it finished barbecuing the town of Paradise. I was lucky enough to still have a house to come home to after they lifted the evacuation orders, but it burned every square inch of property outside a 40' ring around the house. My palletized wood survived under a close fitting tarp, but the only sign of all that manzanita we'd worked so hard to move was an inch thick layer of ash where it had been piled.
Crews had also dropped hundreds of trees along the road into my place, and nobody seemed to want them. I spent weeks with the tractor hauling them home, replacing that manzanita stack with one even larger, but mainly of oak. The winters were mild enough and I had other more pressing issues, so that wood sat until last year before I did anything more with it. Once it cooled off, I got it all bucked up into 18" lengths, put the tarp back on, and started looking for a way to provide more permanent storage. I wanted something steel, and something that would seal tight enough to keep embers out. The answer was a shipping container, one with doors on both ends so I could use most of it for firewood and still have room at the other end for the splitter.
In the photo above, to the left you can see a stack of the steel pallets I mentioned earlier.
This past summer of 2020, California had the worst fire season ever. Twice over a month period, wildfire once again got within a few miles of the house, and all that wood was still sitting out in the breeze. Once it cooled off enough to work outside again, it was time to start fabrication on those steel reinforced plastic pallets and get to splitting again.
I got to cuttin' and a weldin' and soon had my first two knocked out. The photo above shows them stacked, which is when I realized the top and bottom rails need to go the full width of the pallet to provide stability. And the first time I tried to lift a loaded pair of them, I realized the plastic in the bottom one wasn't strong enough to lift the top one through the four bolts that attached the hoops. So two more lengths of tube got welded in between the hoops across the bottom of each pallet.
And that pretty much brings us up to date. So far I've got eight pallets worth of wood shoehorned into the container, and I figure there's room for about 16 more. There's a freshly cut up steel pallet in the garage just waiting on me to cut them to length and weld up some more hoops. If I can get away from this keyboard soon enough, I might even get some more wood split today.
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