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Maggie’s The Woodchuck and Firewood Hoarders Thread

picked up my 500i today sporting the 25" bar.
one thing that i found with the local one was we get them with larger dogs, and on both sides.
all the vids that i watched shows them with smaller dogs where people upgrade them to 'western' ones.
aussie website depict the 500i with only one small dog on the inner side.
lucky i didn't have to cough up for the upgrade of the dogs and chain catcher.
now to find time to give it a whirl.
Guilty of Treeson did a good review of one. Seems very nice. I will never need one though.
 
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picked up my 500i today sporting the 25" bar.
one thing that i found with the local one was we get them with larger dogs, and on both sides.
all the vids that i watched shows them with smaller dogs where people upgrade them to 'western' ones.
aussie website depict the 500i with only one small dog on the inner side.
lucky i didn't have to cough up for the upgrade of the dogs and chain catcher.
now to find time to give it a whirl.
Still unobtanium here. Local dealer claims after the first of the year for round 2 of production. Good YouTube video out now where a fella runs the same bar and chain on a 462, 500i, and a 661. The 661 wins by a breath. Very close. Let us know what you think.
 
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after just watching the vid above im confident i will be impresssed, but will report back

i ordered mine nearly 2 months ago and it happened to come in today with me walking in the door this afternoon noticing it on the shelf with my name on it. great timing for me
 
After watching that video I noticed something.........

........there was a decided lack of 55yr old fat guy cutters......hmmmm🤔

Having watched numerous chainsaw fail videos on YouTube it was nice to see how the professionals get it done.
 
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Guilty of Treeson did a good review of one. Seems very nice. I will never need one though.



Thats a snow machine with a deadly implement up front.

Kind of surprised it seems to bog on some of those cuts.

My 440 rips through shit without slowing down.......maybe I just need to cut bigger wood.
 
Thats a snow machine with a deadly implement up front.

Kind of surprised it seems to bog on some of those cuts.

My 440 rips through shit without slowing down.......maybe I just need to cut bigger wood.
Just like LRP shooting. So many variables. Is the wood you’re in dead standing oak or green blow down hard Maple. Is the bar 36” or 25” (takes more snort to run a long bar). Chain sharp are just sorta’ sharp. Running high octane fuel or convenience store garbage. I couldn’t give a tinkers shit about what brand or color of saw. The fact that you’re outdoors in fresh weather, getting exercise, and enjoying the byproduct of a nice wood fire in the stove or grill is what matters. Heck, even a scrawny old duffer like me can bog a 661 running bar deep leaning on the spikes. Have fun and be safe fellas.
 
Had a carpenter over doing some work and he saw me headed to the woods. He brought out his electric chainsaw and said, "you know your chaps will not stop one of these, as they have no clutch". I had never given that a thought as I don't have any battery powered saws, but it sounds like it could be correct.

I don't want to test any of them myself!
 
Had a carpenter over doing some work and he saw me headed to the woods. He brought out his electric chainsaw and said, "you know your chaps will not stop one of these, as they have no clutch". I had never given that a thought as I don't have any battery powered saws, but it sounds like it could be correct.

I don't want to test any of them myself!
It’s correct that chaps are not rated for electric saws, but I believe it’s due to the torque of electric motors and it’s constant. A combustion engine creates power in pulses which allows the fibers to plug and stop the bar chain more efficiently. Someone not to long ago explained it well in this thread.
 
It’s correct that chaps are not rated for electric saws, but I believe it’s due to the torque of electric motors and it’s constant. A combustion engine creates power in pulses which allows the fibers to plug and stop the bar chain more efficiently. Someone not to long ago explained it well in this thread.


Electric anything gives you 100 percent of its torque right from the start unless the motor is built in with some sort of "power up" for safety/power reasons which a chainsaw would not benefit from.

Recently someone posted a vid of a guy getingt (no pun intended) wrapped up in his winter coat in an industrial lathe.

The motor appears to have locked up for a few moments but than that torque took over and it became brutal.
 
after a few hours of use i must say im very impressed with the 500i.
chewed through these near dry gum trees reasonably quick.
but i need a longer bar as i had to come in from both sides on the larger ones.
can you tell im no pro? :ROFLMAO:

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still have a lot of cutting and cleaning up to do. had over a dozen uprooted and the biggest ones are yet to come. the one in the middle left of the pic above has to come down too, is dead.
 
To me those arrows always pointed out the individual logs.
They are slid down vertically into position.
 
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A whole lot of extra work into those joints but nothing special about how they are put together, just stacked one on top of another.
 
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That's leave a mark. That's the sucky part of cutting trees for firewood. You just never know what's in the tree.
Barbwire on my farm.....geeze the barbwire...

I spent all summer getting many hundreds of feet of fence out of the woods, some of it as much as 9 strands. It had grown into the Chestnut Oaks it was stapled to as much as 8 inches in places. It was ancient stuff but would still mess up a chain in a skinny minute.

My arms are mostly healed up....mostly....
 
Barbwire on my farm.....geeze the barbwire...

I spent all summer getting many hundreds of feet of fence out of the woods, some of it as much as 9 strands. It had grown into the Chestnut Oaks it was stapled to as much as 8 inches in places. It was ancient stuff but would still mess up a chain in a skinny minute.

My arms are mostly healed up....mostly....

My wife's uncle fell from 5 stories and lived, barely but lived. I went out and cut down a dozen 12-16" wide trees and brought them back to their property. I can't remember the number of chains I went through but it was more than 10. These trees came out of an area that should never have had a human near them. It was private company property with no house, no livestock, nothing around. I can't tell you how much barbed wire, nails and I remember 1 tree had a 6 inch long bolt going through the middle of the tree. That one nearly cost me body parts.

How does that kind of stuff find it's way inside trees when there's not any recorded history of humans being near them????
 
My wife's uncle fell from 5 stories and lived, barely but lived. I went out and cut down a dozen 12-16" wide trees and brought them back to their property. I can't remember the number of chains I went through but it was more than 10. These trees came out of an area that should never have had a human near them. It was private company property with no house, no livestock, nothing around. I can't tell you how much barbed wire, nails and I remember 1 tree had a 6 inch long bolt going through the middle of the tree. That one nearly cost me body parts.

How does that kind of stuff find it's way inside trees when there's not any recorded history of humans being near them????
People have a way of being where you’d least expect LOL
 
I have a few wood permits I need to fill before the end of the year, took the dog out and had fun. He loves to play on logs. He's wild.
This is a fun way to spend Christmas Eve.
 

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Well, it can happen anytime. My wife and I went to the woods yesterday to start a fire and clean an area up. I was not cutting wood, just cleaning up brush.
A tree had rotted off and fell into another tree. I grabbed it and pulled away from the other tree. It moved some but did not want to go. Like an idiot I got under it and pushed. It went, but before I could celebrate having pushed it over, about 6 feet of the top broke out and showed me who the boss was.

Stay safe out there!
 
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Long time fire wood cutter here, first year burning wood in our 1979 house(been using gas logs since I can remember). Chimney is all brick(no liner), ash dump in bottom and metal dampner to vent smoke. The first few nights it went well considering I'm used to diesel and a backpack blower to start fires. The last 2 nights I've had smoke come back into the house, not bad but ceilings are vaulted and no good way to remove smoke.

Neighbor is a chimney sweep and said to try opening a window when starting fire and be sure to keep wood as close to the back as possible. Haven't tried the window yet but sounds good with creating extra draft. Any others out there got the same setup?

If the above doesn't work and decide to keep burning wood, will look into a chimney exhaust fan.
 
try take a rolled up newspaper , light it and hold it up almost into the damper and let the hot air from the burning paper start a draft
This + window trick should work. Once it's started and pulling good you got to keep it going though.
There's a FS cabin in West Virginia that has an old stone fireplace. I remember having the fire die down during the night one year and filling the place up with smoke.
 
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Well we’re finally moving to the farm permanently. I have about 5 cords of 3-6 season old split oak in the wood shed here and plan to throw it all in the dump trailer and take it up to the farm. Can‘t let it stay here to be used by a man who didn’t have any part in its processing 🤠

I have several cords worth of logs lined up in my pasture at the farm that need cutting and splitting. I have a new battery in the splitter and it’s ready to work.

It is going to be busy for the next month but I am ready to live where my heart is.
 
Well we’re finally moving to the farm permanently. I have about 5 cords of 3-6 season old split oak in the wood shed here and plan to throw it all in the dump trailer and take it up to the farm. Can‘t let it stay here to be used by a man who didn’t have any part in its processing 🤠

I have several cords worth of logs lined up in my pasture at the farm that need cutting and splitting. I have a new battery in the splitter and it’s ready to work.

It is going to be busy for the next month but I am ready to live where my heart is.


Congrats!!!
 
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Our firewood season is crazy this year. Absolutely,over the top demand that we can't keep up with.
Here's a pic from yesterday. I was running a good chain and about 5 min into a tank when I picked up some metal
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When we had our farm in Downsville, heating our pre-war farmhouse was quite expensive. The only heat systems available were electric ($300.00 per month in 1970’s dollars) or a small butane heater that did not do the job.

So, we got a small woodburning stove and never looked back. It had the power to heat the entire little house. I ran a McCullock ProMac 55 ragged but it kept on. Problem was our woodlot was too small and loaded with too much loblolly pine to provide the wood we needed. So, we had to purchase some wood, which I cut and split to size. Still, purchasing wood was far less expensive than using any other heat system. (if I might brag on myself, I became quite adapt at dropping trees in the middle of the woodlot, exactly where they were supposed to fall)

The John Deere got the wood where I wanted, and I split with a double bit axe. (You mean they have machines that do that now???)

So, when we sold the farm and built the lake house, Brenda Lea said NO WOOD, NO Dirt being dragged in! So, we have a heat pump which does the job and a butane stove with a pilot light that backs the heat pump up. But I do miss my stove, the easy starting hard running McCullock, and the John Deere 950.

(Late life allergies include wood smoke, so maybe I really don’t miss it as bad as I think I do).

Still, among my favorite memories, was Brenda Lea, Will III and myself, sitting around that stove on cold, cold winter days, a pot of chili on the stove and nothing but warmth in all of our hearts.
 
When we had our farm in Downsville, heating our pre-war farmhouse was quite expensive. The only heat systems available were electric ($300.00 per month in 1970’s dollars) or a small butane heater that did not do the job.

So, we got a small woodburning stove and never looked back. It had the power to heat the entire little house. I ran a McCullock ProMac 55 ragged but it kept on. Problem was our woodlot was too small and loaded with too much loblolly pine to provide the wood we needed. So, we had to purchase some wood, which I cut and split to size. Still, purchasing wood was far less expensive than using any other heat system. (if I might brag on myself, I became quite adapt at dropping trees in the middle of the woodlot, exactly where they were supposed to fall)

The John Deere got the wood where I wanted, and I split with a double bit axe. (You mean they have machines that do that now???)

So, when we sold the farm and built the lake house, Brenda Lea said NO WOOD, NO Dirt being dragged in! So, we have a heat pump which does the job and a butane stove with a pilot light that backs the heat pump up. But I do miss my stove, the easy starting hard running McCullock, and the John Deere 950.

(Late life allergies include wood smoke, so maybe I really don’t miss it as bad as I think I do).

Still, among my favorite memories, was Brenda Lea, Will III and myself, sitting around that stove on cold, cold winter days, a pot of chili on the stove and nothing but warmth in all of our hearts.
Sounds like we have anouther stud amongst us gents
 
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Stopped in the Court House the other day, one of the guys working there said he wanted to sell his trailer. Said he thought it should be worth $100.00. Paid him and went to his house to hook it up, I went back and gave him some additional money and told him he sold it to cheap. I think it is still cheap.
 

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About a year ago I bought a couple of Sugihara bars. One is a 20 inch, the other a 24 inch.

The 20 inch was put on the saw when it was new. I have run 76 tanks of gas through it and was hoping the bar would last for 100 tanks, but it is starting to show some wear. Had hoped the pictures would show more, but they didn't. The 24 inch saw only has 17 tanks of gas on it.

The sprocket on both saws are one tooth bigger than stock. Chain runs a little faster, but not sure how much.

I have a Cannon bar to try when this one is finished.

I don't remember how much the Sugihara bars were, but I would buy again if not for the Cannon bar that is waiting.

The saws came with Oregon bars. On another saw a couple of years ago I ran the Oregon bar. Changed the tip once and got close to the 100 tank mark.
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Stopped in the Court House the other day, one of the guys working there said he wanted to sell his trailer. Said he thought it should be worth $100.00. Paid him and went to his house to hook it up, I went back and gave him some additional money and told him he sold it to cheap. I think it is still cheap.

That's nice of you to go back and pay him a little more. It looks like a sturdy trailer. Why can't I ever find these kinda deals.

Congrats!
 
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Stopped in the Court House the other day, one of the guys working there said he wanted to sell his trailer. Said he thought it should be worth $100.00. Paid him and went to his house to hook it up, I went back and gave him some additional money and told him he sold it to cheap. I think it is still cheap.
good on you. i also have paid extra on something before, many times to my guys if the whoop it on, its the only way to be and the unexpected money is a surprise and welcomed