Our sawmill insider has his say on the latest issues.

WITH the recent glorious period of hot, dry weather it’s been time to try to escape from the sawmill for a few days.

I did a little oak job over the winter and there were still a few trees remaining, so I popped back early one Saturday morning and, with the ground dry and firm, it took no time at all to fell them. A quick tidy provided a wagon-load of firewood which I’ll probably use myself as no-one seems to know the art of burning oak logs. It’s quite easy if you know how.

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Oak usually needs a bit of a hand and what I do is create a hot fire of offcuts from pointing posts. Then, once that’s burning strongly and you have a nice, hot ash bed, pop on some big oak logs. In my experience, the fire will then burn away quite happily for the rest of the evening.

Joe Public puts one oak log in the fire, then tries to light it with a packet of fire lighters, which may well work with dry birch logs, but not with oak. Oak is a dense wood and people often mistake this for dampness. Even dry oak logs require a little know-how. I can’t be bothered with people coming back complaining that logs are damp when I know they’re not, so I think I’ll just keep the majority for myself.

The next job I’m going to will involve the big old Cat and requires the felling of some hedgerow ash trees. Ash, although it burns quicker than oak, can still be a tricky log wood. I’ve come to the conclusion that the great British public are used to garage forecourt logs (often softwood) which burn in an instant, and customers to the yard often make that comparison. 

I loathe dealing with log customers and really only sell logs because I run a sawmill and feel obliged to. The logs burn either too fast, too slow or are damp – you just can’t win!

On the subject of the old Cat, it hadn’t moved for at least four or five months and I assumed the batteries would be flat. However, unlike modern vehicles which still pull power from the battery even when switched off, it fired up first time. I also noticed that despite the fact the vehicle is over 50 years old, the oil pressure didn’t rise. Even more remarkable considering its age is the fact that all the gauges work, with one indicating a fault. A quick inspection revealed a broken pipe running from the engine to the gauge, probably caused by a mouse or squirrel.

For whatever reason, rodents seem to love oil. A few years back, a friend gave me a box of two-stroke bottles when he decided to close down his garage business. Several days later I noticed there was oil everywhere and on closer inspection I noticed a mouse had chewed through the cap of each bottle.

Taking a closer look at the pipe on the Cat I reasoned I might be able to make a temporary fix provided I was very careful. The broken pipe had an olive which I was able to knock off. I managed to do this on a section of tarmac as if I’d done it in the woods I would never have found it. I then stretched it with the point of a pair of long-nosed pliers and managed to fashion a repair in about 10 minutes.

Can you imagine trying to repair a modern computer-controlled piece of machinery brought to a standstill by a mouse? I happen to know someone with a big Quadtrac agricultural tractor who’s just spent £80,000 on a repair. So for occasional-use machines, it’s best to stick to the classics.

While finishing off the last few oak trees, I noticed something that had been bemusing me for some time. A wooden field gate giving access to the wood has a half-round rail along the top of the gate. This has completely rotted on one side and the rest of the gate is fine, but the more I looked at it the more familiar it seemed and that’s because I made it about 20 years ago.

It’s interesting that in the UK we are led to believe foreign-grown timber is slower growing, tighter grained and therefore lasts longer. Some merchants even advertise the benefits of using imported slow-growing redwood decking, supported by self-appointed ‘experts’ on wood treatment reinforcing and supporting these claims. And yet here, as if any evidence were needed, was a gate constructed of home-grown and much-maligned Sitka spruce standing perfectly intact after 20 years in the field with an imported top rail of Latvian pine which had all but disintegrated. I know spruce doesn’t like being stood in water, but in lots of scenarios – if it can breathe and dry out – it can outlast many so-called ‘superior’ products.

As I’ve said many times, I wish the people who sell these things would be more honest about wood preservation so that as an industry we can all move forward. It’s all right coming up with a theory as to what works, but it’s no good if it doesn’t work out in the field where it really matters. Practice and theory very rarely work hand in hand.

I would rather sell dry spruce than class-4 ground-contact timber, thereby avoiding all the complaints. It’s interesting that the Wood Preservation Association has been conducting field trials with posts that were put in the ground seven years ago. It has recently dug them up, but the results for the pine posts seem to have completely disappeared. It’s fine showing kiln-dried spruce, but where is the pine? Come on, confession time!

Anyway, getting off the thorny subject of wood treatment, I had a field of grass that needed turning into hay. While delivering sawdust to a client I noticed an old reaper bar in a barn. I have ended up paying £80 for said reaper, but it works perfectly.

Life must have been very simple years ago and it made a welcome break from the day-to-day technicalities I face in the sawmill. To bale the field I bought a small, round baler off eBay as they are technically quite simple. A conventional square baler has lots of moving parts. 

Forestry Journal:

When the baler arrived it was quite battered and bruised, yet it was only a few years old.

After several attempts to get it working I came to the conclusion it had probably never been working. Nothing seemed to be adjusted properly and the oil reservoirs were all dry. So, having made the adjustments and oiled the thing up, I finally got it going.

I tried to imagine the scenario. Person buys baler off the shelf in a box. The instructions are missing or in a foreign language. Chinese? Unfamiliar with IKEA products, the purchaser throws a hissy fit and attacks said baler with a hammer before throwing it with force into some dark and unloved corner of a barn where it lies untouched until someone spots it and puts it on eBay. 

I guess I’ll never know!