Wood shed concept

[xman23]

My stacks are 2 rows, with a roof frame tarp support. The row ends supports have chains that are screwed into the wood. I've been thinking to turn this design into a permeant roof.

 

[Poindexter]

I wonder about adding cupolas every 20 feet or so to let water vapor out?

Or maybe some kind of full length vent up near the peak? Like have the purlin closest to the ridge sit 1/4" proud of the rafters instead of flush like the lower ones?

I get that the plastic is working fine for you. I too am building long skinny sheds to minimize handling and materials cost be damned. Switching my design from multilayer poly sheets to corrugated fiberglass to finally plastic on a roll makes mine doable for me.

Any cats in your barn? I wonder about building bins that will hold enough wood to be 900# after the wood is seasoned. As in toss in 1600 or 1800 # of green oak out in the field into a bin, once that wood is seasoned you got a 900# load your tractor can handle, park the bin in the barn for the cats to get at for a week or two before you move the bin to the garage. You got two Ashfords that hold maybe 50# at each reload, two loads a day, so 100# per stove per day, a 900# bin would last you 4 or five days in the deepest darkest depths of winter up here...

Just thinking out loud. If I had a tractor with a cup holder next to the steering wheel...



4x100x6 = 2400 cubic feet, /128 cubic feet per cord, I count 18.75 cords per stack and you got 3 of those.

Sawing 6 inches off the bottom because of the pallets is still 4x100x5.5 = 2200cuft, /128 17.2 cords per stack and you got three of them, 17.2*3= 51 cords.

I must be missing something. Maybe you got some kind of anti-gravity paint so you can fill a 50 cord box with 20 cords of wood ;-)

Best wishes.

 

[jeffesonm]

My $0.02 on palletizing wood... I went down this path, and even sized the purchase of my JD 4310 for this very purpose. I made cubes using pallets which would hold about 1/3 cord of wood each and covered them with 4x5 pieces of rubber roofing. It worked pretty well, but I ended up switching to a regular wood shed. Moving 1000+ lb piles of wood around even with a good size tractor is a little shady. Much harder to maneuver than with a forklift and you need lots and lots of room, not just for all the pallets but to maneuver the tractor with a big cube hanging of one end. It also left ruts in my yard, even with turf tires. And you need a lot of pallets, which get annoying as they break, rot, etc. Those metal cages from IBC totes would be good, but again, you would need a lot of them.

I built a shed that can hold up to 15 cords and I plan to just let it dry in there. I burn 3-4 cords/year so it should have ~3 years to dry. I will bring it up to the house in a half-size pallet box that holds about 1/5 cord.

 

[Ashful]

As always, you're putting lots of thought into this ventilation, Poindexter. Worth consideration, down the road.

Re-iterating post #18, all stacks made prior to this year are 40" wide. At 5.5' tall x 150' long, I believe they total out around 22 cords. Wouldn't mind having 50 cords, but I don't!

Mousers... my neighbor has a cat, which likes to hang around my wood stacks. It'll never be able to keep them clean, but I'm sure it gets some stuff. No barn cats here, or firewood in the barn... it's a fully heated and air-conditioned workshop, and I pretty much always have one project or another laid out in there.

Appreciate your experience on this jeffesonm. My tractor is smaller than yours (24 vs. 31 hp, and 1900 vs. 2700 lb.), which creates some advantages and disadvantages. It's smaller, if I remove the loader, but I don't want to have to do that every time I want to move wood. Plus, I can't lift pallets high enough with the 3-point to double-stack... that would require the loader. My machine is lighter, as would be my pallets of wood, so ruts may be a little less an issue. I'd be interested to see how you laid out your wood lot, to maximize use of the tractor for moving wood.

 

[jeffesonm]

The pallet cubes I made were 48"x40"x40" and held about 1/3 cord. Oak is 4500+ lbs/cord green, and 3500+ lbs/cord dry so that made the pallet cubes around 1200-1500lbs depending on how dry they were. That's a lot to move around, even dry. A few times I would lift them up on to my front porch to easily move the wood in the front door, and only 3-4' up in the air is shady, even with a 2700 lb tractor, a 400 lb counterweight on the back and 500 lbs of beet juice in the tires. You need a lot of weight in the back to balance that much up front. Picking them up with the 3pt pallet forks is much more stable than the loader forks.

I did not try to double stack but keep in mind the bottom one will need to support the 1200+ lbs of the top... my pallet cubes would have collapsed, I'm sure. You can pack them full but they shrink as they dry, probably 5-10% I would guess. I also would not want a heavy cube of wood that high up unless it was on something super solid. If you go that route I would consider pallet racking.

You would need a lot of pallets too. 22 cords x 1/3 cord cubes would be 66 cubes x 4 pallets/ea is like a truck of pallets. 66 ibc totes would be better, but they are hard to find free.

My wood lot is literally a wood lot, in the middle of the woods, so the close quarters exacerbated the space problem. You would have better luck in a big field.