DieselBound
Elite Member
I don't know the lay of your land DB or your climate. I could be mistaken but it seems you like to bring your splitter to the fall. I bring my stems to the splitter after I've skidded them out of the woods. That's the way we did it when I was logging and what I find most efficient. There are a lot of advantages by bringing trees to a landing as far as work space and safety are concerned. I stack my stems that I skidded the year before and when splitting time comes around (which is about now) I pluck the stems out of the pile and bring them to the splitter which is where I stack the wood as it comes from the splitter right to the stack. This saves me an incredible amount of time as I'm not trying to fish out from a pile of wood a bunch of splits that seem to always get in the way of grabbing the next one. I move the splitter down the stack as it builds up. Skidding 5 or 6 cords with small tractors barely affects my ground but my ground is wooded. Don't know about your climate but I only skid when the ground is frozen or snowed upon. This minimizes damage tremendously.
No doubt you can get more wood in your bins by stacking but these sided bins for me would be calling to simply dump wood in them. So basically, if I was doing it the same way with bins I'd line up all of your bins and as they got filled, I'd move the splitter to the next one and so on.
You also helped me in managing my wood lot better. For years I've always stacked my wood on whatever straight branches I'd cut from the crown. What an utter pain this was as seldom do sticks like this match up. I said to myself if DB can spend almost 5k on bins, i can spend the money to get some order for my stacks. I went down and bought 20 10' long pt 2x4's and screws and made my stack rails out of them. It was a $145 I'd never spend until I got tangled up with you. Thanks
Happy to hear that you've improved your situation! I've learned a lot from reading what others have done/do, and, of course, paid attention to my cussing (when I find myself cussing a lot I make it a point to minimize future cussing:laughing
Dry ground, what's that?
I got my Kioti stuck just off the edge of my driveway!I have ditches and winding pathways/"roads." Last winter I had to do some emergency firewood cutting, from snags, and I got my Brutus stuck pulling a section of trunk. Grabbed the B8700 and got the Brutus and that wood. Then, with the B7800, I went after the other piece of trunk and decided I'd try returning via another pathway- WRONG! Got the B7800 stuck! Grabbed the NX5510 and pulled the B7800 out of the ditch! (funny, a friend couldn't figure out why I was going to get a Brutus when, certainly he said, the truck would be able to fetch wood! my old F250 would be sunk in no time!)
Here's an example of some of my environment (and some of the wood I run across- I'd cut a bunch of this previously, in place, and I then pulled this chunk out of the brush with a rented excavator- 19k lbs):
That one (and several others) is still waiting for me! I don't have that much room around the home area to be dragging stuff like this to. The spot in that picture is probably 1/8 mile from the house (others are about 1/4 mile).
The smaller size of the crates makes it easier to place on my deck. It would be difficult to try to work with anything larger. I'm planning on building a new/replacement deck and it'll be designed to facilitate loading and unloading crates much easier (as it is now I'm working right next to the house- I have to really concentrate so as to not create a disaster).
Regarding just tossing the wood into the bins, I did contemplate that a bit. Issue, however, is that pulling the pieces back out tends to be more difficult. Keep in mind that my wife also fetches wood from the crates. And because it rains so much here, and that my deck isn't covered, one wants to minimize the amount of time extricating wood from the bins. I figure that the added time spent initially stacking the wood (when it's NOT raining) is less than the additional time required to separate pieces (when it's raining!) when extracting for burning. I cannot say that I've actually proven this out; perhaps it's all just over-rationalizations? (but, I do emphasize the "wet" for a reason- running outside and fighting to grab wood while it's raining heavily isn't exactly my favorite form of entertainment
). (we have limited space inside the house to store firewood)
