Alden Banniettis

Dan, that sap is really up- me and the clothes I wore the other day debarking are all stained with sap from the spruce and fir.  It even went through my work clothes and stained my legs and arms!

Randall, I really don't have any problem 'holding' the logs that I am peeling.  They are not really poles.  Rather, they are logs- 8" up to maybe 13".  So they are pretty heavy.  Debarking with my draw knife and spud is simple enough but tiring for me at my age.  I have done a few of my logs with the draw knife but I am now going to try a pressure washer.

Randal, I am working only with spruce and fir.  I coud have taken some pine, but I feared it would be more attractive to bugs.  As you may have noted from Mike Haasi's response, it seems crucial to get every bit of the inner bark off also.   The outer bark on spruce and fir seems to come off easily enough, but the inner bark is becoming a headache in that I have to spend extra time getting it off with a drawknife.  A lot comes off with the outer bark, but a lot doesn't.  Using a pressure washer seems easy, but I am not sure it will do the inner bark faster than a drawknife and so I am on the fence about running out to buy one.  I might go and pick up a spud to give my butt a rest from using the drawknife.  All in all, if I can do a few logs a day before being wiped out I should get through some fifty logs soon enough.  Gettng them off the ground is also work- they are heavy and so I have to use my automotive ramps and a rope!

Mike, that is good to know.  I have debarked four logs now, using a draw knife.  It is real work for my 67 year old bones and I still have to deal with a lot of the inner bark as you mention.  I think I will try a cheap pressure washer from Walmart.  I have about fifty logs to debark.  Thankfully, half of them are cedar and will pretty much debark themselves.  But the fir and spruce have to be debarked properly as you say and I pray the pressure washer will save my butt here.

I need to construct a 'lifting shear' (a variation of a gin pole lift/crane) for the posts and beams in a round timber build.  I would like the apex to be twenty feet high.  I will be lifting round timber spruce/fir beams up to 20' lengths & up to 12" diameters, as well as planting posts that are up to 20' tall & up to 12" diameters (incl. post holes of about 4').  Question #1: spruce or fir for the two legs of the shear?  Question 2: how thin can the round timber shear legs be?  The load logs are still somewhat wet, so I am supposing their weight to be up to 1000 lbs.   I am hoping that 4" diameter spruce or fir legs would be fine.  I found a photo that shows pretty much what I want.

Hello to all! So I have just shaved the bark from the first log for our round timber framed cordwood home.  Despite my years of research, I forgetl at this moment whether it is imperative to remove the second thin layer that lies just under the outer bark.  In the photo you may be able to see that, here and there, I have left patches of this inner layer.  Will it fall off on its own with time?

Yes, I like the idea of letting nature do most of the work.  Would there be much benefit to spreading out a large cheapo tarp and spreading the logs out for better exposure?  Or, maybe stack them like firewood?  Just leave them in the mountain as they are?

In the attached photo we are looking at about five hundred 2-foot cedar logs (6"-13" diameters) that are slated to go into my cordwood home.  I have another five hundred on the way.  They were cut in the past couple months of winter and I have about eighteen months or a bit longer before they go into walls.  Once our snows melt I will get to work debarking them.  For those wondering why I did not debark the cedar when it was tree-length, the answer is that I did not do the cutting and we only had a pickup truck for transport.  Thus, the cutter did them in 2-foot size since he could load them up easily and because that is my wall thickness.  I live in northern Maine.  I have experience in building with cordwood, but somehow it never happened to me that I had to debark, especially a zillion small logs.  Of course, it would have been easier if they were tree-lengh.  But it is what it is.  Worse, I am doing this solo.  There is little chance that I will find helpers where I am at.  So... Please feel free to give me even your wildest guesses as to how I might get these logs debarked without knocking myself out.  I have various tools handy: draw knife, blades, etc.  I can likely manage to build a shave-horse.   Thank you in advance!

The elevations are terrible, Mark.  It is pretty flat land.  Water never ends up on the road because the town's ditch is pretty deep.  Oddly, the western half of the lot does not drain into their ditch even though they are right next to each other.  

Mark Beard wrote:You wouldn’t need a liner or sand or any of that if you have as much clay as you say .  Woukd still cost more in time and equipment to do a pond of any size. If the elevations are suitable to drain to the road like you said, then that’s a good plan…. BUT if you wanted, you could use the excavator to dig a small pond before at some point along the ditch if you wanted… just dig deeper and wider in that one spot, create a little frog pond 🤷🏼‍♂️

Hans, the town has their roadside ditch and they do not seem very concerned that anyone will drive into it.  My ditch is perpendicular to the road and goes a couple hundred feet back into my field and to the woods.  If someone be stuck in my ditch back there I think they would have some explaining to do!  Anyway, not much traffic around here- we are cut into the forest and off of a dead end farm road.  

Hans Quistorff wrote:I would recommend only as deep as necessary and proportionally wider as it gets deeper. So at 2' deep 4' wide. Animals falling in it  in my experience is not the problem but people and vehicles.  My ditch as described is no problem with mowing and strangers do not get stuck in it.  The narrow ditch in the next pours water fast enough to flood the road ditch onto the road and several vehicles have been stuck in it at considerable expense.