When an oak tree falls in your yard, you have two choices: pay a tree company $1,500 to clean it up or deal with it yourself. I opted to clean the tree myself and harvest the wood. It was a lot of work, but I cut this giant oak tree into pieces using a chain saw I purchased from Harbor Freight.
This saw cost me less than $200 and performed much better than expected. I do not regret purchasing it over a name-brand saw for $600. The chain stayed sharp until the end of my work, and it has many hours on it with no trouble. I only used premixed saw fuel and kept the bar well-oiled.
After cutting the trunk into large logs, I drug them over to the area where I would process them into firewood. I quickly determined that splitting these logs with an ax or maul would not be an option. I began seeking information on gas-powered log splitters.
A decent log splitter could be purchased for between $1,500 and $2,000. I also looked into renting a log splitter, which costs a couple hundred dollars daily. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon a friend who already owned a log splitter and was willing to let me use it in exchange for a good lunch. A good friend who attended this lunch towed the log splitter to my house using their truck.
I used this log splitter to split A LOT of wood. While splitting, I replaced the retractor, spark plug, and air filter and added oil. I was also careful to use only ethanol-free fuels.
The split wood began to build up quickly. I was surprised by how much split wood came from a single log. After just a few hours, my wood rack was full, and I needed to visit Lowe’s to purchase supplies to build more rack space.
After about six weekends of splitting wood, I was finished and realized that I had way more wood than I needed. I decided to list some of the wood for sale. I started looking around at prices for oak firewood.
