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Firewood Cutting Rack

If you have ever tried to cut small diameter trees or limb wood before, you probably know that it can be akward and a strain on the back. It occured to me the other day that I could probably build some sort of rack that would allow me to pile these pieces up and cut them all at once. Since I needed to cut some of this type of wood right away I decided to improvise a little for now.

As you can see from the image it consists simply of a pallet and six stakes. It worked really well and not only did it save my back, but a lot of time too. We have a pair of forks on our front end loader for feeding out large round hay bales, so all I did was cut the logs to a transportable length and drive a load of them over to the cutting rack. I lined one end of the logs up (in the left of the image) so that my last cut next to the stakes would produce a usable length. Then I started cutting the odd length sticking out of the other end (right side of image) until cutting at the stakes produced usable lengths. I did end up with some small chunks on the odd length end, but all in all the process was very efficient.

The Husqvarna Rancher 55 made short work of it and now I've got dead elm and ash wood to burn in my Tarm Solo 30! I'll likely formalize my design a bit and build a real rack in the future, but for now the stakes are working just fine...