Three foraging days over the previous three weeks have been enough to almost refill the wood-store, and more than enough to provide adequate cardiovascular exercise:
If that lot's not enough to keep us warm this winter, we have a reserve stash of hefty bits which I'll need to chain-saw when I can find the time:
We had to expand our range of wood-processing tools...
The reciprocating saw and the chainsaw, both Aldi/Ferrex products, are excellent bits of kit. I didn't need to buy any 20/40V batteries or a charger for them, as I already had those for other bits of Aldi/Ferrex equipment.
The reciprocating saw came with a general-purpose blade which will get used for other tasks, but for pruning and timber-cutting I'm using SabreCut SCRS644D and SCRS1531L blades.
For some strange reason the chainsaw was supplied with a 1.3mm gauge chain (91PJ045X) that was tight in the bar, so it was running hot and slow. I replaced that with an Oregon 90PX045E (1.1mm gauge) for a tenner and now it's cutting like a charm.
The Titan Pro Raptor Kindling Wedge was a speculative purchase, bought on eBay during the pre-Christmas sales, and it is proving to be brilliant. So far it's dealt with everything that we've tried to split, from 1" poles to 10" rounds, and it's much safer than a traditional hand-wielded splitting-wedge.
The rest of the tools were already in the stash, so no outlay there.
Going equipped...
It's not all about finding firewood:
Occasionally we find something much more interesting:
A Red-tailed Hawk.
There's a Hobbit hiding away in this clickable pic. Kudos if you can find her:
Said Hobbit emerged to take this impressive pic:
Clearly her phone's camera is much better than mine!
We're having a wood-burning stove fitted next month, so we've been preparing for the big day.
All of this wood was locally-foraged and free, and no live wood was cut other than the trunks pruned from our hazels and buddleia.
It should help to keep our future heating bills at an affordable level:
We built this during the "big freeze"... two or three more days of foraging, sawing and splitting should see it filled:
"Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice"
