Heroic efforts

My de-facto hobby appears to be "sawing logs in half, by hand": for the last two months (or more?) I've been doing more of that than making things out of wood, or playing music.


At work, on the far side of the main parking lot is a group of brushpiles -- a staging area for the groundskeepsers -- big ol' piles of grass clippings, and pruned branches waiting to be mulched. I always swing past to see if there's anything interesting: I have standing permission from the head groundskeeper guy to grab interesting pieces of wood.

On August 3rd, I brought home a fairly large log: 40cm (18 inches) in diameter, and 60cm (two feet) long (see photo). Not too big if you're a professional logger -- but large enough if you're hefting it into the trunk of your car. And pretty darned heavy: after I cut it in half, I weighed myself plus each half, then subtracted my weight. The total of the two halves was 172 lbs (78 kg) -- basically, what **I** weigh! Explains why it was so hard to get into the boot (sorry: "trunk").


After about three sessions, totaling four to six hours of sorry (sorry, didn't keep precise track), I managed to cut it in half. I needed to do that so that it wouldn't split as it dried: if it splits in undesirable places, that reduces the amount of useable lumber you can extract.

Famous woodworking editor Chris Schwarz has commented several times that ripsawing by hand is perilously close to actual work. In deference to the French style of ripsawing which he advocates, I did spend some time sawing whilst sitting: I sat on a wooden chair, offset from the log to allow the free swing of my arm; then I put the log up on a smaller log (positioned like a chopping block).

Oh: once the cut was well underway, I alternated arms. A **lot**.


So far this is the largest piece of wood I've sawed through: made me wish I had a larger saw -- maybe one of those one-person crosscut saws, but re-filed as a rip saw. (Someday...) Because the length of the saw blade was only slightly longer than the wood itself, it was a bit tricky sawing through it (see photo).

I'm partway through halving the existing halves -- thus ending up with four quarters. Then I'll cut the remainder into slabs and beams. I'm hoping that as the pieces of wood become thinner, they'll be faster to cut through (e.g., quartering it is faster than halving).


It's not **hard** work -- just a little slow. Depending on your mindset, it's either tedious or meditative.

I **could** use a chainsaw -- but the kerf (thickness of cut) is about a quarter of an inch. Given the relatively small diameter of the log, I'd rather leave that quarter-inch on the lumber, rather than on the ground as sawdust.


After two or three years of the wood seasoning (i.e., drying out until the moisture content stabilizes), I'll turn it into a adolescent-sized workbench -- which can double as a simple desk, if needed.


(Final photo by my 5 y.o. daughter)


--GG