Some Green Woodwork Practice

Some recent storms here in northern California took down a bunch of trees.  I grabbed a couple pieces from an ornamental flowering tree, possibly a cherry or some other nonfruiting fruit tree.  I have no chainsaw, so I took a couple pieces that had been cut to about 3 feet long and looked fairly straight.  Each was about 5-6" diameter.

The two pieces of tree

Man, that just-felled wood is heavy!  I know much of that weight is water and they'll be far lighter after drying, but I was surprised at just how heavy they were.

The first thing I did was to remove the bark.  I thought the drawknife would be the better choice here, but it turned out that the hatchet worked far better.  The drawknife was good for cleaning up, though.

Bark removed from one log

I cut that log into two roughly equal length sections before trying to split it.  That was interesting in itself - there was no great way to hold the log still while sawing.  And all my crosscutting saws are for dry wood, so the kerf got a bit tight as I sawed my way through the log.

Splitting was interesting, too.  I had seen Curtis Buchanan's and Peter Follansbee's videos of splitting huge logs with wedges and sledgehammers.  I don't happen to own a sledgehammer, but I do have a fairly heavy short version of one.  I have two wedges that I found at a garage sale a few years back - glad I finally got to use them.  I also don't own a froe - that would have been ideal.

After several hammer blows, starting to see a crack forming

Split well along the pith, but there was a fair bit of twist in the log

Splitting a half log was much easier than the whole log

I learned something valuable here.  I'm currently battling some tendonitis in my dominant right elbow.  Lifting the hammer many times using the biceps is a mistake.  I learned to let the hammer swing up like a pendulum (but going much higher than a pendulum), instead of lifting it up.  After each hammer blow, I'd let it drop, swing towards the back, then use my body to create some momentum to get it to swing all the way up overhead for the next blow.

Here's another piece with a large crack formed

Split along the pith, but with some twist

This one I wanted to try splitting into three ...

... and it worked well, though the three pieces are far from uniform

The next two pictures show how much and how quickly this wood changed color.

A stack at the end of one day (fairly light in color) ...

... and the next day it had turned orange

I was crushed at the end of a few hours work!  I like to think I'm in pretty decent shape, but every time you do something out of your ordinary work, your muscles will let you know.