Haha! Travis, you have just brilliantly illustrated what I am coming to consider a law of Permies.com, which is that when people ask for information on doing a thing, what they will most often get instead is a bunch of strong and smart feedback that boils down to "Why in the heck would you want to do
that when you could do something
else instead?" And indeed, there often does exist a series of good answers to that question.
I really do think the humble sawbuck is a forgotten technology that has advantages that will appeal to many in the Permies community, and since there do not appear to be any good information sources about sawbucks either here at Permies or on the broader internet that Google will easily reveal, I hope to make this thread into that resource.
Travis Johnson wrote:I am not a huge fan of the sawbuck because it requires lifting the wood onto the sawbuck in the first place. This is not too bad if the wood is smaller in size, or softwood which is most often the case in Alaska, but where hardwood firewood rules, it is a strenuous aspect of firewooding.
This is a fair point, and one that my parents "cheated" on by the liberal use of child labor. They would stand braced against the sawbuck with the running chainsaw in hand and feet well placed underneath, an elder child loading logs onto the sawbuck from the other side and a younger child (always me) clearing away the pile of dropped wood in periodic frenzies during short impatient breaks when it got too tall. Thus they avoided all of the back-destroying bending and lifting part of the process, though they did trade it for what must have been a brain-melting amount of whining, bitching, and complaining.
Travis Johnson wrote:Most people just dispense with the lifting and buck the firewood right up to short lengths (16 inches) right on the pile with the chainsaw for this reason.
I would say that this is true; I certainly saw a lot of it done, although not by my parents, who considered it -- rightfully, I think -- too unsafe. We were 200 air miles from the nearest doctor or medical facility, with no road access at all except in summertime, and no modern communications except an emergency radio link of dubious reliability and the possibility of summoning an Air National Guard helicopter airlift; as a consequence, my parents were rather big on safety and we were all raised to take a little more time and think things through, avoiding inherently chaotic situations entirely. To this day, I pretty much don't mess with any sport that relies on inducing adrenaline through fear, or on reducing the coefficient of friction between my feet and the ground (skiing, skating) -- and I've never had a broken bone or a messed up joint. But
cutting firewood on a pile quickly creates a messy situation, with pieces everywhere, your feet in unstable situations, your body out of balance, and that infernal machine in an ever-changing position with respect to your tender body parts. A
gasoline chainsaw is in my opinion the single most dangerous human-portable tool on any homestead, with the possible exception of a properly-sharpened double-bitted axe; and I exclude the latter (reluctantly) because the skill necessary to sharpen it properly almost always comes with enough
experience to render it reasonably safe in use. Emphatically not so with a chainsaw!
With all of their care, my parents managed a couple of seriously bloody wounds each from chainsaws over the years they cut all that firewood, and went through boxes of butterfly bandages (the poor man's stitches). They were lucky never to lose a finger or a toe. But it was always while doing something bizarre and random -- notchwork on a cabin build at a funny angle while working on a ladder, that kind of stuff. The grunt work of cutting up firewood, they reduced to a system and kept it safe by using a sawbuck and keeping the saw well away from their extremities with a sawbuck leg between the work and their own leg. I don't think that was at all crazy, or a bad tradeoff for extra labor under the circumstances.
Also, remember that:
1) The sawbuck is, originally, tech for cutting up firewood with hand saws. You can't easily use a flat-bladed hand saw or a bowsaw down on the ground in a woodpile; you need the pole in the air and ideally a bit of gravity assist to cut wood this way. Early chainsaws, too, were huge heavy things mostly fit for felling trees; some of them even had a handle on the tip of the bar for a second man, like a crosscut felling saw. They wouldn't have worked without a sawbuck either for this task.
2) Not everybody wants a chainsaw. The safety issues are real, and the gasoline ones are noisy and smelly. The electric ones -- the good ones anyway -- are really quite ridiculously expensive.
3) Not everybody can afford a chainsaw. Travis, you're awash in farm and logging equipment; and indeed the amount of sheer raw mechanical
capital in the rich modern world is astounding. But not everybody is that rich or that modern. We've got plenty of folks here on Permies who by choice or necessity are trying to get by with hand tools, sometimes because that's literally all they have. Plus, it's a really good question how
sustainable all the motorized equipment is going to be going forward in the long run. Paying attention to the infrastructure that makes chores like cutting up firewood with a bowsaw tolerable doesn't strike me as a completely insane project.
4) Bucking firewood is not the only reason to have a sawbuck in your yard. There are plenty of woodworking tasks that involve taking a pole or a log and "doing something" to it. Stripping the bark, cutting notches, splitting it in half, cutting a point on end, I could go on and on. Many of these tasks
can be done down on the ground if you are young and juicy and have a perfect back, but it's often worth the extra step of lifting the log (one end at a time, it's not so bad) up onto the sawbuck (where you can even secure it with a spike, if gravity and the v-notches aren't sufficient) so that you can work on it at a convenient height. The sawbuck is, essentially, a workbench for roundwood.
Travis Johnson wrote:If a person is going to use a sawbuck, why use a chainsaw at all though? Why not just buy a cordwood saw and use one of them to cross cut the pieces of firewood? They can be found for cheap used, and still are being built new. With the right size wood, they are very fast, and a very efficient way to produce firewood.
There were two or three of these infernal machines in the little town I grew up in, where they were called "buzz saws". My father was actually half-owner of one that was a real antique, although I only recall him using it once. A buzz saw has very little to do with solving the problem for which the sawbuck is the solution (how to hold logs securely at working height for processing with hand tools whether powered or unpowered) but it truly is a wondrous device for turning poles into firewood, if you have no regard whatsoever for human safety. The one my father had an interest in had no blade guards whatsoever, and the belt drive on it ran to a drum he put on the rear axle of his '49 Ford flatbed truck. The day he ran it, we children were banished to inside the cabin on pain of pain, while he and mom cut up four cords of wood in very short order. But he literally wouldn't let us out of doors while it was spinning. (He did power it down several times while they took smoke breaks and we cleared wood away from their work areas.)
Travis, I have enjoyed and admired your threads about logging equipment. If I won the lottery and had a few million bucks to "invest", I'd probably buy one of those really capable things (I don't know the proper terminology) that grabs a tree with a robot saw gripping head and chops it and limbs it and stacks it on the trailer -- and then
advertise my services around here for Eastern Red Cedar removal, which people pay serious money for. With a minion running beside me towing a huge shredder and chip trailer for all the trees too small for limbing/stacking, I'd get paid to haul away cedar poles and endless wood chips, both of which I could
sell for serious money. Of course, it doesn't pencil out when you figure in the cost of capital, or everybody would be doing it, but it sure would be fun! But my point is this: here at Permies, if nowhere else, we ought to be able to explore questions of "how do I do things the old-fashioned way?" without having to defend the notion that we might want or even
need to do things the old-fashioned way. Not everybody is sat on a place with a motorized tool for every task, nor prepared to invest in all those motorized tools.
That said, here's my very specific situation that's got me thinking about sawbucks.
I don't heat with wood, nor am I likely to do so until the zombie apocalypse hits. In Central Oklahoma our heating needs are minimal, and our current housing is designed to use a very small amount of delivered natural gas to do it, which we sometimes supplement with electric spot heat (actually cheaper at times). So I don't do firewood, and (given my traumatic childhood experiences) I'm perfectly happy to continue with that.
However, we live on 40 acres of cross-timbers deciduous mixed-hardwood forest (some parts returning from former pasture and heavy abuse by oil development) so we are utterly awash in wood of all sizes from sapling poles to ancient fallen hardwood trees multiple feet in diameter. And I have essentially nothing but hand tools to manage it with, plus one feeble battery chainsaw and (as of a few days ago) a brand new small gasoline chainsaw. I'm not going to be cutting firewood, but I have been and will continue to be cutting limbs and encroaching trees at the fringes of the yard, doing trail management, and pulling selected logs and poles out of the woods to make
fence poles and structural members for various small outbuildings. (I really need to get a poultry coop built!) If I cut down a red cedar tree and limb it and drag it back into the yard and it's fourteen feet long and I decide I want to cut two feet of flaring butt off and then cut it into two six foot poles, sure I can cut it down on the dirt with my new chainsaw, but I don't want to! Or I can awkwardly throw one end up on a sawhorse or a
bucket or something and try to make a square cut at a 45 degree angle, not easy nor safe with nothing to hold the pole in place. Having a sawbuck to hold it while I make the cuts seems by far the best option. Remember I'm dragging this log out of the woods by hand ... I don't have a
tractor! So the additional quantum of labor to put the log up on the sawbuck really doesn't matter much in the grand scheme; it's probably less than I'll spend struggling with the uncontrolled log while cutting it another way.
We also have a lot of quite special tree species on the property with wood that's sought after for one reason or another. I don't have a sawmill or any immediate hope of having one, but I do want to build a little woodshed and start drying some choice logs of Osage Orange, Persimmon,
Honey Locust, Hickory, and Oak, against the day that my brother-in-law gets his set up. Being able to set a log up at working height and study it before cutting off the curved and knotted and rotten/split bits will make that somewhat easier and more efficient too. Also, I've got a smoker, so having wood at a convenient height for chunking it up (with whatever saw) for the smoker doesn't seem like a terrible idea either.
So I'm being stubborn here. I maintain that the humble sawbuck still has a place in the world, and I'm fixin' to build me one. I'd love for like-minded Permies, if there are any, to share what they know: designs, experience, videos, whatever!