My first "Mechanised farming" attempts were my highly successful Potato harvesting efforts. Driving the tractor on that occasion and watching hours of digging being done quickly and effortlessly in my wake made me realise that if I was to manage to get control and produce to the full potential of the small holding I was going to have to drop my town house kitchen garden mentality and go mechanised.
Another huge and one of the most essential parts of keeping this place going is the production of large quantites of fire wood. As you can see from the first photo's many of our visitors have helped with this activity and since we have been lucky enough to recieve the great wood piles of 2005/6 and 2007 from the real farmers next door we have not gone short, all without having to chop down many trees ourselves.
The whole process is quite time consuming, involving the following steps. Harvesting, moving to saw (or moving saw to wood), cutting, splitting, moving to stacking position, outside stacking to dry, moving to final stacking position, stacking again, moving to fireplace and burning. The above procedure, in effect, means that you handle each piece of firewood 7 to 8 times before it's in the fire and producing heat. It's clear to me that some cycle time reduction is required. I have plans to modify the saw such that I can attach it to the back of the tractor and move it to either the location of the uncut wood or the location of the stack, removing one of the moving steps. I also have plans (hopefully I will soon have the front end loader on the David Brown working) to come up with a smarter stacking and transporting method to remove the loading/unloading of a trailer and multiple stackings of the wood.
One of the slowest and most pysically demanding steps, when done by hand, that can not be engineered out of the cycle is splitting the wood. If the logs are too big to go in the oven you've got no chioce but to split them into smaller bits. Quite a lot of the wood that we have stored and after a large Birch was cut down outside work an amount recently processed needs splitting. As you can see from the pictures, our New years purchase by the wonders of hydraulics takes the axe out of the equation, saving a huge amount of time and effort.
It's so easy that my dear expecting wife stepped in and promptly took over after I had had about 3 tries, leaving me to cart the wheel barrow back and forth and stack the wood.
I had hoped to use this for the first time on the freshly recommisioned David Brown, but as you will see from the pictures and blog post (coming soon) on More-Power, getting the hydraulics working on that has taken a little more than a simple oil change. The trailer is full of dried wood, ready for moving down to the car port, splitting and stacking. I had hoped to have the trailer on one tractor and the splitter on the other, we may well run out (yes the pile that Our Parents helped us move early in the new year is nearly used up) before that is possible
4 comments:
Some Questions / Suggestions.
Following last years increase in scale and the mechanized harvest do you look like having sufficient spuds for the year?
On the wood processing system. How about using the slope of the site to make a gravity feed operation as follows...
Bring wood to cutting station. Load onto saw and cut into logs which drop onto Drying stack(s). The stack slides down hill while drying. It is is emptied from the bottom where logs are passed through the splitter and drop to the final stage where they are stacked on pallets for final delivery to house.
The system could be setup in a number of ways to aid handling. You might consider two or more drying stacks separate ones for logs which need splitting and one for the smaller stuff which does not.
(I think the hole in the floor in the barn was probably for that type of approach.)
TSS,
Not quite sure if I can quite see how your system will work in practice! Anyway, there's one flaw it's best to split logs as soon as you cut them. Not just because they split easier but also because the dry quicker and are easier to stack.
One also has to consider that the minimum drying time is 1 year and with the stocks that we have now, it's most likely we won't be burning the wood we've just finished chopping before winter 2009, maybe even 2010!
I have a rough plan in my head involving a "lean to" extension on the barn, lots of modified pallets and an extention for the front forks that we apparently have for the David Brown so that said loaded pallets can be transported.
This system should mean it's Chop, split and stack all in one location, all movement thereafter being done by the tractor.
Um. OK. I was basing my comments on the process two years ago where we did a lot sawing, no chopping and a lot of stacking. I remember the tiring bit as picking the sawn logs off the ground placing them in a wheel barrow. The drying stack was on top of a pallet with corrugated tin sheet to finish. Splitting of larger logs was left for much later. You have improved a lot since then.
The saw, split and stack to improve drying time and stacking certainly makes sense. I am wondering how you keep the logs of the floor to avoid all the lifting and handling work with reasonable inventory between each of the steps. Its nice the way you have the log splitter pushing the logs into the wheel barrow, but I remember one whole log more than filling a wheel barrow. Some larger intermediate storage would perhaps allow a more continuous work flow? Can you get the logs to drop from the saw to the same level as the feed to the splitter to avoid the effort of picking them up?
One piece of kit you might build would be a self leveling table which keeps your pallet working height constant as you add more logs forming the stack. (Saves bending down again - which is where the aching back comes from.)
I can see the 'lean to' on the barn would have attraction saving some construction effort. However you might want to keep a gap between the wood store and Barn, particularly if you are going up in Height. 1. Air flow for drying 2. Access to Barn 3. Risk of damage to Barn if a stack falls or foot slips on tractor clutch pedal.
Sounds like quite a big building project given the volume of logs you want to cover. Interest to see how your ideas progress to plans and project work.
I do like the idea of a standard Pallet or Box if you can get there without too much effort and cost.
At last I'm on line where I can send messages easily.
Love the picture of our father and the tea tray in the foreground. We had our priorities right!
Have just about recovered from the aching back.... no seriously, we enjoyed being useful when we stayed.
Hope that London son has done his bit. Is the second garage door up and how are the hydraulics?
Very belated 4th Anniversary congrats. I tried to send this message on the day from Beeston's dial-up without success. Its worse than useless.
Oh yes. Our Father was trying to work out the length of a piece of wood for a screen he's making for the Cathedral. hence the need for various mathmatical formula. He finally got hold of toco who went on line to get the right formula. After the mathmatics had been done, it was found that all the pieces of wood should be the same length. ~what a waste of a morning. Thanks for phoning last night. We were enjoying the company of R. Wood Esq at a short notice supper. Home after 11.p.m.
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