How to Chop Wood

by B. Dear

There are many reasons for cutting your own wood. You may have purchased a new home with a fireplace or a wood stove or changed the method of heating your home. Although, having a fireplace or wood stove in your home creates a wonderful atmosphere, you will need to come up with a way to fuel it. 

To heat your home, you either have to buy wood from someone else, or you can cut your own. Since buying wood can be rather expensive, you may need to start developing a reserve of wood at your home for those cold winter months. Be forewarned that cutting your own wood, takes a lot of energy and is not for the faint of heart. However,if you are in good health, it's a great way to get in shape.

In order to cut wood, there will be a few items that you will need. You will need:

• a whole lot of wood, 
• an axe, 
• a means to split wood, 
• safety gear (thick leather gloves, steel-toe boots, chainsaw helmet/shield, heavy cut resistant clothing)
• a chainsaw, 
• a cart, wagon, or truck to move the wood and 
• a lot of energy. 

Before starting to prepare your wood reserve, be sure to take note of the safety warnings and precautions in your equipment manuals. Always wear safety equipment and clothing while using your equipment to prevent injury to yourself and others. Before cutting anything, ensure that others are at least 15 feet outside of the cutting area. This will ensure that the axe or flying pieces of wood do not injure anyone. 

To get started, you will need wood. If you don't live in a wooded area, try scoping out forested public areas for fallen trees or large branches. These need to be loaded in a truck and taken back to your work area.   Try to separate the wood into small branches (kindling), medium sized logs and large logs. Some of the large logs can be used to build a makeshift sawhorse to cut your wood on.

Once you have wood to work with, you will need to create a work area. This area should be open and not near your home. You will be making a lot of wood chips and sawdust that will look unsightly in your driveway, etc. There is also a risk of termites in the wood that you definitely don't want anywhere near your residence.

Now, we will discuss using the axe. When cutting logs, make v-shaped cut cuts in the smaller logs cutting each piece into a length of about 1.5 feet. You do not want to try to cut straight into the log. By cutting from the left and right alternatively, you will be able to make a larger and deeper "v" in the wood until you are all the way through each piece.  Toss each piece into your cart to move to the wood stack.

There are some logs that will take too long to cut with the axe. These pieces will require using the chainsaw. Always be careful to follow the instructions in the manual that comes with your equipment. Chainsaws can quick back and injure you severely if they are not used properly. Also, if chainsaws are not properly maintained, the chains can break, also resulting in a bad injury. Once the chainsaw has been started, operation is fairly straightforward. Make cuts dividing the wood into 1.5 foot segments. Pay special attention to how the logs fall when cut. I recommend starting at one end of the log and cutting  segments from one end to the other letting the log segments fall one at a time. If these logs are more than a foot in diameter, you will need to split them with a maul or a log splitter. Very large pieces of wood will not burn quickly and may not fit in your wood stove or fireplace. Once the wood is split, you can load it and take it to your wood stack. 

Finally, we will discuss creating your wood stack. You will want to stack your wood to keep it off the ground and allow it to dry out. The wood can be stacked as high as you want as long as it doesn't present a safety hazard by tipping over. You will want to position it so that it gets a good amount of sunlight and air can blow through the stack when the wind blows. I usually stack wood between two closely positioned trees to give the stack some stability at the ends. This allows you to stack the wood higher. If trees aren't available, you can easily build a box-like structure using 2X4's to keep the wood in place. You will want to position your wood stack close enough to the house to make wood runs fairly convenient, but not so close that a termite infestation of the wood stack will damage your house.