Making firewood – a hobby or something you have to do if you don´t want to freeze? I guess it´s different depending on who you ask. When I was making firewood for my parent´s house it was a drag. I looked for equipment that would make it easier. Something cheap and simple. I did find it – 10 years after my parents installed earth heating.
The firewood maker´s friend
I have been working within forestry since 1978 and have seen some development of equipment. To my mind, the best inventions and improvements are the simple ones. It doesn´t matter if we are talking about forest machines or other types of equipment.
Simplicity could be described in different ways. To start a process by one single push on a button is simple. But the technology that make such a simple act possible is complicated. Advanced technology makes machines simple to operate, and simple technology make machines complicated to operate – in most cases. But not always …
The most ingenious ideas are those when simple technology makes something simpler to use or operate. This type of ideas is very difficult to find. As I visited the APF show in the UK back in 2018 I stumbled over a tool that to my mind comes very close to such an idea.
The wet dream for a firewood maker(?)
I never dreamt about firewood machines where you can just push one button and a machine starts cutting and splitting by itself. These types of machines are much too expensive and complicated for me. I cut firewood with a chainsaw, because I have chainsaws and can handle them. Normally, I did cut the wood directly in the wood pile. That was quick but the problem was that there could be earth and small stones in the pile. So, I sometimes used homemade sawhorses.
One problem with the sawhorses was that they were often heavy and difficult to move when the firewood stack grew too big. 10 odd years after I struggled with those problems, I suddenly saw the simple solution. It was a simple construction that would have made it very easy to handle almost all the logs I cut for firewood back then. I don´t know anything about patents and versions of this thing. But this one is called the Timber Croc and is made in Ireland.
A modern sawhorse
The Timber Croc is so simple that it´s amazing that nobody thought of it before, or that I never saw it before. For the kind of firewood I was doing this would have been perfect. You just lift the log and sticks it into the frame where it gets stuck in a horizontal position. Then it´s a piece of cake to cut the log in whatever lengths you want. You can even place a wheelbarrow or similar direct under the log to make it easy to remove the firewood.
Photos from the APF show in 2018:
There is no point in being bitter, but why didn´t this thing turn up when I needed it?
Read more about it at Timber Croc’s home-page.
Photos: Per Jonsson
