New strategy for splitting and drying firewood

We have a lot of chestnut coppice in our woods. It is long over due for felling, and hence a lot of the timber is WAY too heavy for fence posts etc…

A month or so ago I visited someone else’s wood and he showed me his system. The idea is to take the wood in long lengths (120cm ish) and use wedges to split it down it’s length to desired size.

We tried it today and really liked it.

Key advantages:

We don’t like working with short lengths in the woods. It just generates extra handling loading and unloading to get it home.

The butt logs from some of these stool are seriously heavy. If they come down a distance from the track they can be too much bother to haul track side. With wedges we can split them immediately down to comfortable weight pieces.

Our experience with air drying chestnut is it needs at a minimum two years to season, but ideally three or more. We can’t store that much in our main shed at home - at most two years worth of wood. So stacking it to dry in the woods is a bonus.

Great plan.

When I lived next door to you in Surrey, I was a volunteer for the National Trust - the eco friendly conservation part, not the manicured lawns and coach loads of cauliflower heads . . . (Oops . . . Nearly headed off on a mini rant there). I loved working with chestnut and the coppices we managed were an amazing resource. When we started, no one had done anything for a decade or two, so there were some massive lumps of timber. We only cleared 10% a year, so eventually there would be a real mix of timber size and a mixed level canopy, which is good for birds.

We didn’t have a system like yours, just lots of blokes hauling wood to the track where the tractor and trailer was ready. We split and used some for a traditional split fencing where you stack horizontally in a zig zag fashion.  

You’ve got a great resource - coppicing is awesome.

That load took us about 2 hours of fairly gentle pootling - experimenting with different techniques with the wedges etc...  I feel like I could process a full pallet stacked about 5ft high comfortably in a day. A long weekend would be sufficient to process a year of firewood with this system I think, if I were able to camp out on site.

We love our woods, but haven't been up there enough in the past few years. The distance from home is just a little awkward, and our two boys were a bit too small. Taking one of my rare days off to head up there without them would have been hard to justify. These days they can come too, and are both more independent.

Our long terms aims include bringing some of the overgrown coppice back into cycle, and felling some of the canopy to let more light into the forest floor for biodiversity. We have a mobile saw mill as well now, so we can get some good lumber out for personal use.