How to Mark, Buck, and Split a Tree Into Firewood

Welcome back to RuggedMade. I'm Jared. How's it going, everybody? I'm Jake from Dude Ranch DIY. Well, we're back down here visiting Jake and hopefully you saw the previous video where we brought this guy down. We got a chance to see Jake, a real tree professional, in action. Yeah, that was a lot of fun cutting down the tree and now we're going to continue on with the evolution and finish processing it up into firewood. All right. So, walk us through it.

So, the first step would be now that we got the pole on the ground, I like to mark it up into 16" rounds. It's just easier when it's all in log form like this. So I personally like to use this thing - it's the Mingo marker, a can of spray paint, and this wheel is set to mark it at every 16 inches. Why 16? So, I like to do 16 because I sell firewood and that's the most common length that people sell in. It's easy to measure out a cord. It fits in most people's stoves and fireplaces, solo stoves, and stuff like that. So, 16 also works really well to fit into the IBC totes that I use to stack and store the firewood in. All right. Well, we've got an upcoming video where we'll be talking much more about that but, all right, so 16 inches. Yeah, so this is pretty simple. Basically, you just pull back the wheel until it stops like so. I drew a little arrow on the end. You have the arrow right at the end of the log and then you basically just walk down it.

[Music]

So, here we are in the woodlot and, Jake, I have to say, it's really come a long way since the last time we were here. I think folks who are following your channel, they've been seeing every installment as you walk them through all the things you've done. And, if you haven't subscribed to Dude Ranch DIY yet, be sure to do that. But, for people who don't know the whole story, tell us a little bit about how we got to this point because this is impressive. Yeah, so when we bought the property, I had this vision of turning it into this woodyard being totally out of sight for both the road and the house, long road in, and basically hit the ground running. If you guys watched the last video with the Wood Max chipper, that basically chipped up all the trees going back here. I have videos making the whole wood yard, and I think the last time you were here, I had it cleared but it was just still bare dirt. Yeah, so then I brought in about 40-45 tri-axle loads of asphalt millings. Dumped that all, spread it all. That was a pretty big undertaking, and now we have our working woodyard. It's always evolving. I'm always changing up the process, getting new equipment, trying to expand a little bit, but it's come a long way. Yeah, last time we were here, there was this little window up through the trees but now it's bigger and we’ve got the millings and might have some interesting things coming up on that [which] we'll get to in a future video.

But, I see our splitter, I see a conveyor, we’ve got a trailer, all kinds of good stuff. So, that's going to be fun to play with. Yeah. But, before we can do that, I think we [have to] wrap up our topic of bringing this tree down. We’ve already got the marks on it. So, what's the next step in this process? So, as you can see, I dropped the first log onto my makeshift bucking table station. High tech. Yeah, whatever you will. As opposed to cutting it on the ground, having to bend over, risking burying your bar in the dirt, or in this case asphalt millings. Two simple logs that I chalked on either side and I just put my logs down on top of it and buck them up and then I simply push them off over here, kind of stage it here, and it's one seamless process. Sometimes when I have another guy helping me, he's on the tractor pulling logs off, cutting them simultaneously while I'm splitting, so the conveyor helps in that aspect. Just moving it away from the splitter and up into the dump trailer. So, I think we'll fire up the saw and get these logs bucked up. Yeah, I guess that's why I'm here, right, to help.

[Music]

Well, we're coming to the end of our day. We’ve covered a lot of ground seeing you as a professional arborist. Kind of seeing the whole life cycle of taking trees down and bucking them up. Yeah, we went today we ran the full gamut, from standing tree to split up in the trailer. Tree to trailer, if you will, and it was a lot of fun getting to show you what I do from climbing and stuff and then having you back here in the woodyard for a second visit to see the RuggedMade splitter in action. Yeah.

So, today, this video is kind of part two. Be sure to check out the first part where Jake actually goes up in the tree, does all that cool stuff. Today, we cut that tree up, we bucked it, [and] we did some splitting. Got to see some of the new gear that Jake's got here in the wood yard, the conveyor. He's got other cool videos about that so check those out. But, we also are running a giveaway of a six-way blade and a few other stocking stuffers so there is a video for that. Check the link in the description because that's still running until the middle of December.

Thanks for coming out. I really appreciate it. Yeah. And, we do have more coming. We're going to stick around down here in the Dude Ranch for a little more time and going to learn a little bit more about what Jake does with his firewood business. We'll just give you a little taste of that. Going to talk a little bit about what it might take to run a business like that and some more tips on splitting wood. Awesome. Look forward to it. All right. Stay tuned. Thanks.