Firewood anyone ?

Kevin the grey said:
Lambertiana , If I ever make it out that way we,ll take a look . You know I have heard strong men of today cry that our anscestors could never have pulled 140 pound bows because these modern men cannot . When I see the pics of those boys working like that I understand that we are (or most of us) just not the same breed . Too much McDconalds I guess ,
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Come on out, I can get to the big trees in 1.5 hours from my house. And you got it right about those guys being toughened up by a hard living. Imagine spending all day swinging an axe or working one of those huge crosscut saws. When cutting a sequoia, they would often end up standing inside the cut to continue deeper into the trunk. Sequoias are buttressed heavily at the base (for example, the Sherman tree is 36' diameter at the ground, and at 1.5 meters above ground it is 27' diameter). So the old time loggers would cut out holes about 4 or 5 feet above ground and insert planks into the trunk, and stand on those to cut at that level instead of directly at the ground. If you visit the groves that were logged, you see a lot of tall stumps.

BTW, I rechecked my numbers, and I have to make a correction. The Sherman tree is only 14' diameter at 180' above the ground. That makes it a small fry.

Send me your email address and I will send you a picture of my nephew standing right next to a big one. When you look at pictures of the sequoias without something in it for scale, you just can't get a feeling for how big they really are.
 
I have no real experience with horses but I do with oxen and I think that pic is just a photo op. Horses and oxen can pull very heavy loads especially on a iced track on level ground. However a load like that would stick very quickly and a single team would have a problem starting the load. Once the load was started they would not be able to go up much of a grade and would certainly not be able to hold the load back on much of a down hill slope.

I would say that after the pic was taken they hitched the rest of the horses up a pulled the load on very level ground. That being said, loggers and farmers of the day where very crafty and used basic physics a lot to allow them to do great feats that would seem imposable at first thought.

My grandfather once decked a bunch of logs with a pair of little hearse horses that several pairs of work horses had failed to deck. He did it at night and refused to tell anyone how he did it. Family lore has it that he drove a pin in each end as a axle and rolled the logs out one by one.
 
I think the skid trails were watered down regularly so the runners would skid on ice. I may be wrong. Happened once.

We use a two horse team, a Percheron and Belgian. A little different in size but they work very well together. We use a logging cart that lifts the front of the logs off the ground. On flat ground the horses can skid two 24" x 16' longs logs. Down hill a little bit more works OK.

http://drafthorsesforhire.com/
 
I posted this link because I thought it had a lot to do with survival. Obviously this was survival during very hard times.

I would imagine all the logs had to be cut with a cross-cut saw by hand.

I would also imagine most of these guys had fingers about two inches thick because they had been mashed hundreds of times between these huge logs. :eek:

I know there are some tough people in this world right now, but I tend to think these folks were some of the toughest ever.

Cliff, I would also like to know how they stacked these logs. And just think of the accidents that must have happened because of these huge logs being stacked so high.

Robbie Roberson ;)
 
Robbie Roberson said:
I would imagine all the logs had to be cut with a cross-cut saw by hand.
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Bucking to length makes felling the wood effortless in comparison. An axe can take down a 12" pine in under a minute and that isn't a rapid pace. You are spending a lot longer than a minute cutting it to length with a saw. The only thing which helps is that you usually work with a partner and thus you are push/pulling so it isn't so tiring, it is way harder on your own and unless you are experienced the saw will travel/bind and you can end up with a lot more effort and a lot less efficiency. There are still people locally who don't use chainsaws for getting wood to burn but use axe, swede saw and a horse. The wood is mainly 4-8" thick.

-Cliff
 
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