Below is a piece of a thread, or perhaps more aptly, an essay, pulled from a homesteading list. I read this a long long time ago when I just started to get into filing and cutting wood by hand. I recently stumbled upon it again and wanted to share
All credit given where it is due, I had no part in writing this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Concerning hand labor there is a myth or a misconception or, perhaps, an
indoctrination that I would correct. That is the concept that tasks done by
machine are several degrees of magnitude easier or quicker than the same
work done by hand. Or to state it another way, compared to machines hand
labor is physically demanding, physically exhausting, and a drudgery. The
general cultural bias is very much against physical labor and very much in
favor of machine assisted labor . or no labor at all . so there is a
definate force of indoctrination to overcome in order to compare the two
objectively.
On our farmstead we are the living laboratory of hand labor. And yet before
I took up each of those facets of farmstead work with hand tools, I too had
a strong and unexamined bias against them. Not that I minded the work but I
was convinced that I'd spend my life in drudgery doing the work with little
to show for it. Since that time I've cut wood with ax, bow saw, and
crosscut saw; reapaired thousands of feet of road with a shovel and 5 gal.
bucket; fed a large family with a shovel and rake (and had surplus to sell),
washed clothes in a galvanized tub, mowed acres with a scythe and gathered
it with a rake and handcart; processed food for hundreds of meals and
hundreds of jars with just a knife; and a great deal more. At every turn
I found the bias to be untrue. It is not significantly easier to *arrive at
the same ends* using machines than it is to do the work by hand.
In the case of the task under discussion, cutting firewood, does it take a
great deal more time, strength, and endurance to cut firewood with hand saws
and an ax than it does with a chainsaw? Here I must inject that this is the
only aspect of this I am addressing. I might in the same vein address the
idea of whether it is a good idea to eat tomatoes or not. People used to
think they were poisonous. You might not want to eat tomatoes because they
disagree with you, or you have a reaction to them, or they are too
expensive, or they are hard for you to grow. But if the reason you don't
want eat them is that you think they are poisonous, then it is a myth that
wants exploding. Afterwards you could reevaluate the usefulness of tomatoes
and decide whether you still didn't like them or not. Just like that most
people who have not done an extensive amount of it imagine that hand labor
is a very great deal more laborous and slower than its machine counterpart.
But that's a myth. There might be many fine reasons for perfering a
chainsaw and hydrolic wood splitter but the idea that it is far, far less
labor isn't one of them.
The first aspect of the woodcutting venture is that we are talking about
supplying your own homestead with firewood. How much does it take? We are
not in a particularly warm clime and yet here in the first week of October
we've needed no wood heat so far. When we do begin to need heat in the
house, there will be a fire in the cookstove in the morning and evening to
knock off the chill with the added benefit that we will cook on it as well.
As the year gets colder we will have a fire in the cookstove all day and
then on those few days that it is really cold, we will have a fire in the
parlour stove and/or the stove in the basement. This last will only be 30
to 50 days out of the year depending on how the weather falls. So in a
really cold year we might need four cords of wood - usually less.
In cutting wood by hand, as with any hand task, it can be done more
precisely and more ongoing than it can with machines. Every copise branch,
every fallen limb, every cleared sapling is stood up and reserved for stove
wood. When driving about in the truck there is always a bowsaw and any
limb or trunk left by the road ends up in the woodpile. Every bush and
twig is sized up by the hand woodcutter as a matter of course. This
'incidental wood' adds up to a cord and half a year, and often much more
than that. An example of this is that last year I came upon where a road
crew had felled and cut up a huge oak tree, cut it into sections and hauled
it off no doubt for their own firewood. The left the 20" section of the
crotch of the tree perhaps 40" across probably because they could not cut it
up with their chainsaw and so could not load it onto their truck. I had my
lighter 6lb maul with me that day and as a hand wood cutter I've had a great
deal of opportunity to consider and contemplate wood grain and the structure
of trunks. A series of blows across the chunk started and widened a split
and before three minutes passed I had the thing in half. Then quarters,
which I could lift into th truck. It was enough wood for almost four days
during very cold weather.
When it comes to sawing up the wood the time and effort are not what the
unintitiated might think. First it requires very little strength to saw
wood. The wood is cut as a function of the sharpness of the saw and the
finesse of the sawyer, not the power behind it. In fact crowding the cut
makes it much harder and dulls the saw. Visitors conversing while I am
busy at the sawhorse often ask to take a spell at the saw to see what it's
like. The invariably scrunch up their faces, tense up, and put their whole
strength to it with the comment "If I cut a whole year's wood like that,
it'd kill me!" I'd kill me too, that's why I don't do it. I relax and
let the sharpness and the rhythm do the work. You quickly learn that green
wood is cut this way, and damp wood is cut this way, and very hard wood is
cut this way. The TaiChi like movements pump a lot of air in and out of
your lungs but I doubt I am expending 10% of my strength against it. Even
the largest two-man crosscut saw (my largest is 6' long) requires very
little strength to use effectively. In fact, the more you force it, the
less it cuts. The Stihl 026 was mentioned in this thread. I have one of
those. Very good saw. But there is no way it takes less strength and
endurance to wield that machine than it does to use my pulp saws and
crosscut saws.
As far as the time goes, the difference isn't that great. There's a lot of
wasted motion and fidgeting with chainsaws. I'd gladly set up two identical
trunks to be cut up for firewood and pit myseld against anyone doing the
same work with a chainsaw. What I mean is to have both saws sharpened and
at rest and begin at the same time from t here on two trunks. The
chainsawer will finish first, but not by as much time as you might think.
Figure in the gassing, oiling, adjutsting, tightening, more frequent
sharpening, and paying for the chainsaw and the difference between the times
involved narrows even more. Thoreau addressed this concept when he said
that if he were to start walking and someone else rode the train, even if
that train went all around the world he'd stay ahead of the rider because
the rider would have to spend so much of his time earning the money to pay
the fare. From his essay on Economics:
________
One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel;
you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country." But
I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that
goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The
distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's
wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this
very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have
travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have
earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this
evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to
Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if
the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of
you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I
should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
-----------
And in the same essay:
"so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them;
there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound
interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments
in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved
end ."
And that is the caution I raise on the notion of hand labor vs. machine
labor. Take care that they do not become "but improved means to an
unimproved end." It doesn't take much more strength and endurance to do
things by hand nor really much more time, although it might well take more
character.
I'll illustrate the idea with one more point. In this installment of
NewFarm there is an article about a farmer seeing the light after farming
large areas with big expensive machines and chemicals:
http://www.newfarm.org/features/0904/thunderhooves/index.shtml
He talks about how he was losing money raising green beans in that paradigm
because he was getting $102 a ton selling them to a canner while his
expenses were more than that. We sold some beans from the place because we
had so many (still do). Because they were completely organic and were hand
picked at just the right ripeness, they easily fetched $2 a pound. In order
to get that $102, I only needed to sell 51 lbs of beans and since I dug the
bean patch with a shovel, dressed it with manure, and picked the bean
beetles off by hand, and used seed I'd saved from last year; my cost was
zero. The whole $102 was profit. Many a farmer, just like this fellow up
to a point, greet the notion of giving up the tractor and chemicals with
"Why, I'm losing money as it is! How could raising LESS ever pay off!?
I've got to get still a bigger tractor and more chemicals!" They never
look back the other way and realize that the Devil is indeed extracting his
interest. Not only might they find the shovel easier, but there might be a
coin or two in their pocket afterwards instead of the creditor knocking at
their door.
Like that, many a modern woodsman puts down the chainsaw at the end of a
session of wood cutting and says "I'm tired, imagine how much more tired I'd
be if I tried to do that by hand!" Yet like Thoreau, I with my humble
bowsaw and easily swinging to and fro in a sustained but quiet dance with
the wood, I always seem to be ahead of them.
James
All credit given where it is due, I had no part in writing this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Concerning hand labor there is a myth or a misconception or, perhaps, an
indoctrination that I would correct. That is the concept that tasks done by
machine are several degrees of magnitude easier or quicker than the same
work done by hand. Or to state it another way, compared to machines hand
labor is physically demanding, physically exhausting, and a drudgery. The
general cultural bias is very much against physical labor and very much in
favor of machine assisted labor . or no labor at all . so there is a
definate force of indoctrination to overcome in order to compare the two
objectively.
On our farmstead we are the living laboratory of hand labor. And yet before
I took up each of those facets of farmstead work with hand tools, I too had
a strong and unexamined bias against them. Not that I minded the work but I
was convinced that I'd spend my life in drudgery doing the work with little
to show for it. Since that time I've cut wood with ax, bow saw, and
crosscut saw; reapaired thousands of feet of road with a shovel and 5 gal.
bucket; fed a large family with a shovel and rake (and had surplus to sell),
washed clothes in a galvanized tub, mowed acres with a scythe and gathered
it with a rake and handcart; processed food for hundreds of meals and
hundreds of jars with just a knife; and a great deal more. At every turn
I found the bias to be untrue. It is not significantly easier to *arrive at
the same ends* using machines than it is to do the work by hand.
In the case of the task under discussion, cutting firewood, does it take a
great deal more time, strength, and endurance to cut firewood with hand saws
and an ax than it does with a chainsaw? Here I must inject that this is the
only aspect of this I am addressing. I might in the same vein address the
idea of whether it is a good idea to eat tomatoes or not. People used to
think they were poisonous. You might not want to eat tomatoes because they
disagree with you, or you have a reaction to them, or they are too
expensive, or they are hard for you to grow. But if the reason you don't
want eat them is that you think they are poisonous, then it is a myth that
wants exploding. Afterwards you could reevaluate the usefulness of tomatoes
and decide whether you still didn't like them or not. Just like that most
people who have not done an extensive amount of it imagine that hand labor
is a very great deal more laborous and slower than its machine counterpart.
But that's a myth. There might be many fine reasons for perfering a
chainsaw and hydrolic wood splitter but the idea that it is far, far less
labor isn't one of them.
The first aspect of the woodcutting venture is that we are talking about
supplying your own homestead with firewood. How much does it take? We are
not in a particularly warm clime and yet here in the first week of October
we've needed no wood heat so far. When we do begin to need heat in the
house, there will be a fire in the cookstove in the morning and evening to
knock off the chill with the added benefit that we will cook on it as well.
As the year gets colder we will have a fire in the cookstove all day and
then on those few days that it is really cold, we will have a fire in the
parlour stove and/or the stove in the basement. This last will only be 30
to 50 days out of the year depending on how the weather falls. So in a
really cold year we might need four cords of wood - usually less.
In cutting wood by hand, as with any hand task, it can be done more
precisely and more ongoing than it can with machines. Every copise branch,
every fallen limb, every cleared sapling is stood up and reserved for stove
wood. When driving about in the truck there is always a bowsaw and any
limb or trunk left by the road ends up in the woodpile. Every bush and
twig is sized up by the hand woodcutter as a matter of course. This
'incidental wood' adds up to a cord and half a year, and often much more
than that. An example of this is that last year I came upon where a road
crew had felled and cut up a huge oak tree, cut it into sections and hauled
it off no doubt for their own firewood. The left the 20" section of the
crotch of the tree perhaps 40" across probably because they could not cut it
up with their chainsaw and so could not load it onto their truck. I had my
lighter 6lb maul with me that day and as a hand wood cutter I've had a great
deal of opportunity to consider and contemplate wood grain and the structure
of trunks. A series of blows across the chunk started and widened a split
and before three minutes passed I had the thing in half. Then quarters,
which I could lift into th truck. It was enough wood for almost four days
during very cold weather.
When it comes to sawing up the wood the time and effort are not what the
unintitiated might think. First it requires very little strength to saw
wood. The wood is cut as a function of the sharpness of the saw and the
finesse of the sawyer, not the power behind it. In fact crowding the cut
makes it much harder and dulls the saw. Visitors conversing while I am
busy at the sawhorse often ask to take a spell at the saw to see what it's
like. The invariably scrunch up their faces, tense up, and put their whole
strength to it with the comment "If I cut a whole year's wood like that,
it'd kill me!" I'd kill me too, that's why I don't do it. I relax and
let the sharpness and the rhythm do the work. You quickly learn that green
wood is cut this way, and damp wood is cut this way, and very hard wood is
cut this way. The TaiChi like movements pump a lot of air in and out of
your lungs but I doubt I am expending 10% of my strength against it. Even
the largest two-man crosscut saw (my largest is 6' long) requires very
little strength to use effectively. In fact, the more you force it, the
less it cuts. The Stihl 026 was mentioned in this thread. I have one of
those. Very good saw. But there is no way it takes less strength and
endurance to wield that machine than it does to use my pulp saws and
crosscut saws.
As far as the time goes, the difference isn't that great. There's a lot of
wasted motion and fidgeting with chainsaws. I'd gladly set up two identical
trunks to be cut up for firewood and pit myseld against anyone doing the
same work with a chainsaw. What I mean is to have both saws sharpened and
at rest and begin at the same time from t here on two trunks. The
chainsawer will finish first, but not by as much time as you might think.
Figure in the gassing, oiling, adjutsting, tightening, more frequent
sharpening, and paying for the chainsaw and the difference between the times
involved narrows even more. Thoreau addressed this concept when he said
that if he were to start walking and someone else rode the train, even if
that train went all around the world he'd stay ahead of the rider because
the rider would have to spend so much of his time earning the money to pay
the fare. From his essay on Economics:
________
One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel;
you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country." But
I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that
goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The
distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's
wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this
very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have
travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have
earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this
evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to
Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if
the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of
you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I
should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
-----------
And in the same essay:
"so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them;
there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound
interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments
in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved
end ."
And that is the caution I raise on the notion of hand labor vs. machine
labor. Take care that they do not become "but improved means to an
unimproved end." It doesn't take much more strength and endurance to do
things by hand nor really much more time, although it might well take more
character.
I'll illustrate the idea with one more point. In this installment of
NewFarm there is an article about a farmer seeing the light after farming
large areas with big expensive machines and chemicals:
http://www.newfarm.org/features/0904/thunderhooves/index.shtml
He talks about how he was losing money raising green beans in that paradigm
because he was getting $102 a ton selling them to a canner while his
expenses were more than that. We sold some beans from the place because we
had so many (still do). Because they were completely organic and were hand
picked at just the right ripeness, they easily fetched $2 a pound. In order
to get that $102, I only needed to sell 51 lbs of beans and since I dug the
bean patch with a shovel, dressed it with manure, and picked the bean
beetles off by hand, and used seed I'd saved from last year; my cost was
zero. The whole $102 was profit. Many a farmer, just like this fellow up
to a point, greet the notion of giving up the tractor and chemicals with
"Why, I'm losing money as it is! How could raising LESS ever pay off!?
I've got to get still a bigger tractor and more chemicals!" They never
look back the other way and realize that the Devil is indeed extracting his
interest. Not only might they find the shovel easier, but there might be a
coin or two in their pocket afterwards instead of the creditor knocking at
their door.
Like that, many a modern woodsman puts down the chainsaw at the end of a
session of wood cutting and says "I'm tired, imagine how much more tired I'd
be if I tried to do that by hand!" Yet like Thoreau, I with my humble
bowsaw and easily swinging to and fro in a sustained but quiet dance with
the wood, I always seem to be ahead of them.
James
