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kareinaThis weekend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_kjar and I went out to one of his dad's properties to help with "ved" (as is written on our calender, or "wood", if you prefer English). I had no idea what to expect, but I have enjoyed "helping" since I was a very small child, so I was game to go along.
It turns out that we were cutting and splitting wood. Now, if that phrase conjures up images of axes and or small hand-held metal wedges in your mind, then you haven't played with the modern accessories that his dad has.
His dad has more than 100 hectares of forest, scattered in various sized patches in the region he grew up, and a number of the members of their family heats their homes using wood. Therefore he regularly cuts down trees, and when they are appropriately dry, he cuts them up and distributes it among those who need it.
The tool he has for this part of the project is a large machine that attaches to his tractor.
One puts the log into one end, pulls a lever, and it cuts off an appropriate length of wood to put into a wood stove later.
The short length lands in a trough, and after each cut a metal pushing arm comes out and pushes it through the metal splitting bars, which results in nicely split pieces all ready to burn.
Then they go onto a conveyor belt, which moves them to the container in which they will be carried to their final destination.
In that first picture one can see a large green trailer in the background, which was filled some unknown amount of time before we arrived on Saturday. Likewise the mesh bags of wood visible in the shed were filled at some unknown time in the past. On Saturday we completely filled the smaller (yet still quite substantial) trailer visible under the end of the conveyor belt in the above photo, and then we used the tractor to load the huge mesh bags of wood intolord_kjar's brother's really huge enclosed trailer (the one he used to help us move to the house). We then drove both trailers to his house (one hour south of where we were doing the cutting, which is one hour south of where we live) and unloaded it all, making nice neat stacks in his wood shed. Just the stacking of the wood took the four of us nearly two hours (longer if you count the water break between trailers).
On Sunday we filled an even larger container.lord_kjar's uncle works as a truck driver, and so has access to those really huge dumpster like things that get used at construction sites to hold things they are removing from buildings. It took us eight hours to cut enough wood to fill that container, and I don't even want to contemplate how long it would have taken to do it the old-fashioned way.
Since there were three or four of us working (depending on the day--his brother was only available half the day on Sunday) with a tool designed to be usable by one person the task went fairly quickly. I spent most of Sunday helping the conveyor belt do its job properly. Since the container we used that day (not pictured) was so huge the conveyor belt had to be angled quite steeply in order to get the wood over the side and into the metal box. As a result the cut and split bits of log were not always grabbed by the metal sticky-outy bits on the conveyor belt straight away, which meant more logs piling up behind. There is a potential for it to jam, which slows things down unjamming the system. Therefore I stood at the base of the conveyor belt and helped the wood actually line up correctly to be carried up the belt.
However, on occasion, some of the logs still were not properly caught and fell back down the conveyor belt, bouncing on the way. I usually managed to keep out of the way, but at least three times the wood managed to bounce off my arm on its way back down. Fortunately, on those occasions they hadn't fallen from very far, so it didn't really hurt (when it fell from further up I had enough warning to get clear of the landing zone, since I could hear it bouncing over the noise of the tractor motor, even though I had my hearing aids off!). There are some faint yellowish bruises on my arm today, but they aren't uncomfortable unless I poke them.
lord_kjar and I went out to one of his dad's properties to help with "ved" (as is written on our calender, or "wood", if you prefer English). I had no idea what to expect, but I have enjoyed "helping" since I was a very small child, so I was game to go along.It turns out that we were cutting and splitting wood. Now, if that phrase conjures up images of axes and or small hand-held metal wedges in your mind, then you haven't played with the modern accessories that his dad has.
His dad has more than 100 hectares of forest, scattered in various sized patches in the region he grew up, and a number of the members of their family heats their homes using wood. Therefore he regularly cuts down trees, and when they are appropriately dry, he cuts them up and distributes it among those who need it.
The tool he has for this part of the project is a large machine that attaches to his tractor.
One puts the log into one end, pulls a lever, and it cuts off an appropriate length of wood to put into a wood stove later.
The short length lands in a trough, and after each cut a metal pushing arm comes out and pushes it through the metal splitting bars, which results in nicely split pieces all ready to burn.
Then they go onto a conveyor belt, which moves them to the container in which they will be carried to their final destination.
In that first picture one can see a large green trailer in the background, which was filled some unknown amount of time before we arrived on Saturday. Likewise the mesh bags of wood visible in the shed were filled at some unknown time in the past. On Saturday we completely filled the smaller (yet still quite substantial) trailer visible under the end of the conveyor belt in the above photo, and then we used the tractor to load the huge mesh bags of wood into
lord_kjar's brother's really huge enclosed trailer (the one he used to help us move to the house). We then drove both trailers to his house (one hour south of where we were doing the cutting, which is one hour south of where we live) and unloaded it all, making nice neat stacks in his wood shed. Just the stacking of the wood took the four of us nearly two hours (longer if you count the water break between trailers).On Sunday we filled an even larger container.
lord_kjar's uncle works as a truck driver, and so has access to those really huge dumpster like things that get used at construction sites to hold things they are removing from buildings. It took us eight hours to cut enough wood to fill that container, and I don't even want to contemplate how long it would have taken to do it the old-fashioned way.Since there were three or four of us working (depending on the day--his brother was only available half the day on Sunday) with a tool designed to be usable by one person the task went fairly quickly. I spent most of Sunday helping the conveyor belt do its job properly. Since the container we used that day (not pictured) was so huge the conveyor belt had to be angled quite steeply in order to get the wood over the side and into the metal box. As a result the cut and split bits of log were not always grabbed by the metal sticky-outy bits on the conveyor belt straight away, which meant more logs piling up behind. There is a potential for it to jam, which slows things down unjamming the system. Therefore I stood at the base of the conveyor belt and helped the wood actually line up correctly to be carried up the belt.
However, on occasion, some of the logs still were not properly caught and fell back down the conveyor belt, bouncing on the way. I usually managed to keep out of the way, but at least three times the wood managed to bounce off my arm on its way back down. Fortunately, on those occasions they hadn't fallen from very far, so it didn't really hurt (when it fell from further up I had enough warning to get clear of the landing zone, since I could hear it bouncing over the noise of the tractor motor, even though I had my hearing aids off!). There are some faint yellowish bruises on my arm today, but they aren't uncomfortable unless I poke them.
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Date: 2013-05-20 10:18 pm (UTC)