Friday 15 August 2008

Firewood drying shelter

With the rainy weather recently we felt it was time we made a shelter to dry firewood under, so it's in good condition when we come to sell it in the autumn. We'd had a first attempt yesterday, but it wasn't really satisfactory so we started again today. The first version had involved tying poles onto stakes, but the stakes sticking up above the poles caused a problem, so this time we tried cleaving some larger poles to make rails that could be nailed on top of the stakes.

The cleaving was quite simple, as long as there weren't any nasty knots in the pole. The first step was to hammer the froe in at the end of the pole using a wooden mallet, and then give it a twist:
Once it's started splitting, you push the froe down, twist again, and repeat:
and pretty soon you have two pieces on the ground:
Tracy had a go too, but found it harder as there's a certain advantage to being able to apply some brute force!
We then hammered six stakes into the ground, the central pair being a bit taller, and nailed the cleaved rails on top of them:
I then began carefully stacking the split logs in rows to dry... but was not carefully enough. D'oh!
We gave up and went home for dinner at this point, and have a plan for stabilising the stacked logs, which we'll try in a couple of days.

Anyway, just so you can see how the shelter looks with the roof on, here it is:
The plastic sheet is weighted down by logs at the sides, and angled so water should run off. Our plan is to extend the shelter at the right hand end of the picture above. continuing the plastic along the length of it.

UPDATE: view the later posts on the firewood shelter:


Mike

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