Drying freshly cut logs

UKworkshop.co.uk

Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Random Orbital Bob":3bvufa1o said:
This old classic doesn't even mention willow as a contender for fires :)

Beechwood fires are bright and clear
If the logs are kept a year,
Chestnut's only good they say,
If for logs 'tis laid away.
Make a fire of Elder tree,
Death within your house will be;
But ash new or ash old,
Is fit for a queen with crown of gold

Birch and fir logs burn too fast
Blaze up bright and do not last,
it is by the Irish said
Hawthorn bakes the sweetest bread.
Elm wood burns like churchyard mould,
E'en the very flames are cold
But ash green or ash brown
Is fit for a queen with golden crown

Poplar gives a bitter smoke,
Fills your eyes and makes you choke,
Apple wood will scent your room
Pear wood smells like flowers in bloom
Oaken logs, if dry and old
keep away the winter's cold
But ash wet or ash dry
a king shall warm his slippers by.

Don't get me started on that blasted poem. It has a lot to answer for in miss information but got to go do some work instead of ranting on the internet (hammer)
 
Are you a tree surgeon Beau?

Personal experience, I agree with it's epithet on Ash, Oak and Birch. Can't speak for the others. Ash is a wonderful burner though although I wouldn't personally burn anything green, regardless the species
 
The golden rule for firewood is that if its dry it will burn and water doesn't burn. Stick by this and you cant go wrong!
 
Random Orbital Bob":78xh9e64 said:
Are you a tree surgeon Beau?

Not quite. Used to be a cabinet maker with ground based tree work on the side. Now mainly log sales with some tree work but again ground based. Never developed the head for heights required to be a tree surgeon.
 
Fair comments chaps. Perhaps the willow which messed up my flue was not sufficiently dried / seasoned. TBH it was a few years ago in another life and the details have faded somewhat.

Cheers

Andrew
 
I remember, many years ago, a couple of large willows came down over the road from us. I put a lot of effort into carting the logs back to our garden then chopping them up and drying them. I was really pineappled off to find they gave off virtually no heat when burned!

Chris
 
This table looks about right and look where ash is in it.

Most species are around 4 kWh per dry kg just not all woods weigh the same. A dry heavy one beats a dry light one so by this equation willow is not great but it's ahead of most softwoods and drys far more easily than most hardwoods and grows at a tremendous rate. If you have a load of willow you will have to load the fire more often than if you have oak but nought wrong with it other than that.
 

Attachments

  • wood-btu-heat-per-cord.gif
    wood-btu-heat-per-cord.gif
    17.9 KB · Views: 28
I know its against the rules (and we are well off topic now) but I burn quite a bit of pine and various conifers including Leylandii in our log burner. This is mainly because we inherited about 2 cords of dry wood when we bought this house (mixture of oak and pine mainly) and have cut about another two cords from thinning out trees. Conifer spits and pops a fair bit, so some care is needed, but our flue has remained fine according to our chimney sweep. You get through conifer wood quite quickly, but this is better than just giving it away or paying for the wood to be removed. We produced about another cubic metre of logs this weekend that we will burn in two or three years time.
 
Off subject, but we get about 2/3Kg of soot out of each of our chimney's every year, chimneys about 10M tall Stainless Steel lined, you can burn anything you like in your fire as long as once a month you have a really hot burn to get rid of the tar deposits, in rural France the Marie decrees how often you have to sweep your chimney/year.

Our Oak logs are stored inside a piggery with open ends, we just stack them on top of each other, but have air gaps now and again, they seem to dry well in about a year, but better if left for two, I have thickness/Planed these with good success.

Mike



 
I think the OPs case of drum making is different from the normal use of logs in woodwork, so normal experience may not apply. I think some Native American drums may be made from willow, certainly from cottonwood which is not dissimilar, I believe.

There is no reason why a hollowed-out log made from a straight trunk would go oval on drying. The tangential shrinkage will be fairly uniform.

A log made from a branch, however, will very likely go oval, because it will have reaction wood on one side, which has different shrinkage properties. Again, some native American drums are oval and work well.

A useful guide is only to use logs with a nicely symmetrical growth ring structure, concentric around the pith. Any ovality in this structure indicates some amount of reaction wood, which will result in ovality on shrinkage. This is easy to see before you do the hard work.

Keith
 
Back
Top