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Dan Boone wrote:I grew up in the boreal forest of Alaska. Everybody lived in a cabin; everybody heated with wood. Our first winter (cabin was new and it sucked, and also it got down to sixty below and stayed there) we burned 20 cords of wood. My sisters like to tell me I was in puberty before I learned that my name wasn't "Fill the woodbox!"
Every cabin in town had a sawbuck in the yard, or what Google tells me is a sawbuck; only I never heard that word. Everybody called them saw horses. But a saw horse, properly speaking, is flat on top so you can rest flat trestles and workpieces on it. A saw buck is a notched contraption for holding round poles and logs while you buck them up into shorter pieces for firewood. (It's also handy for holding any pole or log still and secure while you work on it; a lot of cabin builders I know make big ones so they can do all their notch work at a convenient height.)
But anyway, some of these sawbucks were 80 years old in the 1970s; or looked it; the cabins themselves were that old, but like the moose-hanging racks and outhouses and smokehouses, the sawbucks had probably rotted out and fallen over and been rebuilt a few times over the years. I didn't pay much attention; they were just there. The one in our yard was something my mom slammed together from black spruce poles and cabin spikes, modeled after the ones she saw around town. I haven't thought about them for more than forty years, until yesterday, when I bought a chainsaw. Suddenly, I'm like "Hey, I need a sawhorse, only, no, one of the kind made out of poles with the notch on top to hold stuff while you cut it up."
I figured Permies would be all over this; it seems like basic yard gear for any homestead where trees grow. But oddly neither "sawhorse" nor "sawbuck" turn up more than a few peripheral mentions in our search feature.
And then when I turned to the broader internet, I discovered a number of bizarre and puzzling things.
First of all, everybody makes these out of dimensional lumber now, I guess because it's easier, and possibly because if you do it right, a sawbuck made from flat boards can be designed to hinge and fold flat for storage or transport. Most everything you see online now is a contraption that looks like this:
But this is all wrong! For one thing, the notch on top is supposed to be a support cradle, not a deep canal into which your work piece is plunged. If you have a 24 inch log or six inch log or a two inch pole, four inches of v-notch sticking up will hold any of them securely enough under gravity to cut; there's no need to build a 24" deep V that you then have to lift everything into and out of. And yet, that's how all the modern designs seem to be made.
Much more fundamentally, there are only two crosses (triangle frames). Every sawbuck in my little town had at least three (for supporting longer workpieces) and many had four. And there seems to be a modern misunderstanding about how to use a sawbuck as well, or at least, how to make one so as to avoid dropping log chunks on your feet. I took this illustration from Preparing Wood For Your Wood Stove at the University of Missouri Cooperative Extension, where they say:
The last cut on any log should be made between the cross pieces; first, a down cut until it just starts to pinch and then an up cut to sever the two parts. Be sure your sawbuck allows clearance from the bottom for your saw.
But if your sawbuck has at least three triangle frames, you place two of them slightly closer together than the longest firebox on your homestead (usually a barrel stove or log furnace). Then you do all of your cutting off the end of the sawbuck (so that gravity drops the cut pieces on your growing unstacked woodpile and not on your feet, which are semi-safely under the sawbuck) and at the last cut, you've still got a piece that is equal parts balanced on the last two frames of your sawbuck (held in place by gravity and your non-dominant hand) while you cut the other half off with the saw controlled by your dominant hand as you've been doing all along. None of the cooperative extension madness of doing undercuts in the middle of your sawbuck and having two simultaneous chunks falling on your feet while you try to skip away with a running chainsaw in your hand. WTF?
So yeah, a sawbuck should always have at least three frames (usually not equally spaced) or four (if your obsessive-compulsive disorder insists on equal spacing and you still need the close spacing at the working end for cutting shorter wood, or you're designing for lefties and righties to use the same sawbuck and it's only approachable from one side (some designs have bracing that makes it harder to approach from the other).
So that's all bad enough but what puzzled me worse was that I couldn't hardly find any examples or pictures online of sawbucks made of round wood -- the poles from your own forest. I did find this one which is really terrible:
The only thing right about that is that it's got a horizontal "spine" but that should be a pole, not a huge great honkin' log. Otherwise it's ugly, badly made, the notch poles stick up too far and aren't close enough to the ends, and it's just not right.
And then I found this pretty decent video on Youtube:
It suffers from some of the flaws I'm complaining about above (only two frames, notch poles stick a little too far up) but it's well-made and solid. The dude also "cheats" by using half-cut timbers for bracing that he freehand mills with his chainsaw, which makes his build both harder (that kind of milling is not easy to do, though he makes it look so) and easier (to put together). Plus, he uses threaded bolts and lagbolts, which makes for a very solid and well-made end product. But the sawbucks of my childhood were spiked together with what were essentially long nails, and I think that may account for some of the design differences such as the spine pole right below the V notches. I'd very much like to see a video or instruction set on building one that way with the less-fancy hardware, if anybody knows of such a thing.
So anyway, what do you think? Do you have a sawbuck? How do you use it? Did you make it? How is it designed? What's it made out of? What does it look like? Take a picture, post that here! Do you know of any good internet resources on sawbucks? Post them! In my opinion Permies badly needs a definitive thread on sawbucks. And because this is Permies, the closer to natural building we can get, the better. Round wood construction, joinery tricks, simple fasteners, I don't know. But this used to be something that every homesteader with an axe and a hand saw would MacGuyver up within twenty feet of his cabin door. There have to be resources on this! Is there something in the Foxfire books? Is there a definitive article in a 1972 Mother Earth News? C'mon, we can pull this together...
