Mundanities Vol. 4

It’s that time of year when there’s a run-up to firewood season.  I will soon find myself building a mountain of cut firwood next to the splitter and spending several days splitting and stacking the finished product to season and await its use.  We do not need any firewood for the coming winter, and perhaps even into the start of next winter, but my goal is to get ahead of the heating fuel curve by three winters.

In addition to that we’ve had some work done on the homestead (more on that later) that is prompting some aggressive brush cleanup around the log barn near where my pal Bob felled some trees eighteen months ago.  To that end I’ve spent the past two weeks working in the area extracting brush, cutting wood, and bush hogging.

A simple tool I made from, once again, wood from the scrap inventory and decking screws, has been exceedingly helpful; a saw buck.  It was made from pressure treated pieces left over from some long-forgotten project, took very little time or energy to become manifest.  In sort, a perfect “mundanity.”

Exploiting the properties of triangles and diagonal bracing the saw buck is very light — I can move and maneuver it easily with one hand while the other is holding the idling chain saw — and also exceeding strong with a holding capacity of several hundred pounds.  Thus I can easily get the piece(s) to be sawn up off the ground so that I don’t have to finesse the saw bar to keep it from touching the ground.  Around here if the running chain hits the ground, it hits a rock, and off to sharpening it goes.