Logging again

Never ones to take a long weekend totally off, we did some work over Thanksgiving weekend.  We were in Arkansas near my grandparents farm that my uncle now owns and operates.  We've been looking for timber sized cedar trees to use for the sills of the house and greenhouse and my uncle, Dwayne, had some he wanted cut out of his field - a match made in heaven!  We spent most of Friday and some of Saturday morning turning 6 trees into 6 logs and loading them on our trailer.

First the felling.  Most of the trees came down without a lot of fuss, but there was one exception.  This one took no less than 2 chain saws (it pinched one of them), 2 wedges, an axe and a rope to get down. 

It doesn't look any different from the rest...

Its cut almost all the way through and won't fall.  Lets pull this way

How about we pull this way?

Dang.  How is that tree still standing?

Finally... Down!

Once the trees were on the ground, we had to cut the limbs and tops off the trunks. Some of these are LOGS!

Felling and limbing 6 trees is hard work.  Time to go home.

By the end of Friday, we had all the logs cut and drug up together by the gate (we couldn't drive the truck and trailer into the field where the trees were).

The logs.

Saturday morning, Dwayne used his tractor to help us lift and manuever the logs onto the trailer. We missed having Jeremy's grandpa's skid steer, but the tractor was light years better than loading them by hand! Did I mention that some of these were big?

The biggest logs were lifted on one end by the tractor...

Then we backed the trailer under them....

Then we chained and lifted the other end and backed the trailer the rest of the way to load them.

Unfortunately, while loading them we discovered that one of the biggest logs had a rotten spot all the way through the middle and one of the smaller ones was bent enough that we weren't going to get the timber we need out of it. This required pulling the big one back off the trailer and leaving the little one in the field. We'll come back another time with the chainsaw mill an get some boards out of them, but we didn't want to haul them back with this load if they weren't going to work for the house. There was enough weight on this trailer as it was!

Did you see the bad spot in the log on the right?  Crap.  Time to unload it...

Dragging the next log to the trailer

We got back to Lawrence on Sunday afternoon and took the logs to Tim's (the miller) on Monday morning. Unloading went as smoothly as ever and the logs will wait at Tim's until a reasonable day when we have some time free to go turn them into posts and boards.

Unloading with the bobcat.

 

Moving the last log into the pile.