DIY sawhorse

Since it looks like the Green Deal won't be keeping us warm this winter, I've ordered in more logs.  Mine come from a (very) local tree surgeon, but being waste wood they are not always cut and split as small as my little stove needs.  Anticipating a new batch next weekend, Saturday's job was to build a sawhorse to save wear and tear on the old workmate.

The starting point, an unpromising looking pile of scrap:


Some skip wood - old door frame and some 2x3" sawn softwood, a bit of steel compressed air pipe, and a surplus length of 8mm studding.  My plan to plane off the painted wood with the power planer was thwarted after just one piece by the bearings seizing up, so the rest had to be done by hand with my homemade scrub plane.



I was going to post a step by step set of photos, but it isn't really necessary, the construction is pretty apparent.  The steel tube and the studding make the hinge joints to allow it to fold up for storage.  You can pick the dimensions to suit your stature, but as a guide the leg pieces were 1m long, and the width is 0.8m. When standing, the legs slope at 30 degrees to the vertical, giving a reasonably stable base.

I spent some time using this on Saturday. The current batch of logs has a lot of eucalyptus, frustratingly cut to about 2-4" longer than my stove is wide. Cutting these in half used to be a hard job, but the saw horse gives a way of gauging if they are too long, and holding the overly long ones whilst sawing. The trick is to make the gap between the middle and right legs in the photo the same size as the longest length that fits your stove. Then if the log won't sit across them for sawing, it is short enough to fit the stove already !

Got all my logs under cover now. Just in time for the rain to stop  

We went down to our wood yesterday to find that a massive ash tree had come down on the fence.  There's about 50m of fence to repair, to stop neighbouring sheep getting in & eating the saplings but we've got loads of lovely firewood for the boiler for a couple of years time.  It'll be a big chainsaw job for Mr P & am I glad we have a hydraulic splitter.

I'm envious now. But if it is a big tree, could any of it be made into something better than firewood ?

When you're nice & warm indoors & it's freezing outside, there's nothing better than firewood!
We do know someone who does chainsaw sculptures, I've no doubt he will be bagging a bit. We have previously sawn some of our big Douglas & used it for roofing timbers for one of the sheds.