When you burn wood, expect to service your chainsaw

Brrrrrr!  All of a sudden it’s winter.  Real Minnesota winter.  Last night it got down to -9 degrees and the HIGH today was a windy 9 above!  To top it off, we have a winter storm warning out for tomorrow afternoon, evening and Sunday.  Sigh.

Did I tell you we were behind in getting our winter’s wood on the porch because we were behind in getting the greenhouse done?????

Suddenly, it’s a must to get a good chunk of our huge wood pile in, under cover before it gets buried in two feet of blowing, drifting snow.  And being that David was in school today, I was elected to get done what I could.  After he gets back, there’s only an hour before it’s dark, so we’re limited in what outdoor activities we can do.

Our chainsaw chain was getting dull and I didn’t want to take the time to sharpen it, partly because I knew there was a new loop of chain in a box on the shelf.  I knew that I could just throw that on and get to work.  So I got out a wrench and took the sprocket cover off and pulled the bar slack to remove the chain.  Of course there’s always a huge amount of oily sawdust packed in everything, so I took a few minutes and cleaned it away.  Too much sawdust can plug the oiler, bind the sprocket and affect the performance of the saw.

Once clean, I set the saw on top of our woodbox in the kitchen and got the new chain out of the box, hoping that for once, the right chain got into the right box at the factory!  Yep.  Looked right.  Then I carefully turned the chain so the cutting edges were forward on top of the bar.  Don’t laugh.  Once I was in a hurry and slipped the chain on.  Backwards!  Was that embarrassing!  And it’s easy to do, too!

I had to loosen the tension on the chain to engage the tightener into the bar.  But once the cover was loosely bolted in place, I could adjust the chain tighter so that it just lifted clear of the bar.  Then, tightening the nuts, I was in business.

I cut, split and hauled two wheelbarrow loads of wood, then cut up and stacked a bunch of lengths so when David got home we could get at it hard.  And we did.  We hauled in five wheelbarrow loads more and put it in our pile on the back porch, split a bushel basket full of kindling, then pulled out more lengths to cut tomorrow morning.  The storm should give us tomorrow morning to work.  I hope…..

By then it was dark and we went to work in the donkey pen in the barn to make it more air-tight. You see our cute donkeys thought it was fun to rip the tarp off their gable end of the barn….back when the poop was two feet deep in there.  And boy did the wind blow in bad during our last little storm.  I had wanted to get that end sealed with nice tongue and groove lumber like the south end, but we ran out of nice weather real quick.  So we stapled the tarp back up, nice and tight and packed hay into cracks at the eaves.  I’m going to nail a blanket over the door opening so they can come and go.  I wonder if they’ll leave it up????  If I lock them inside, they get bored and chew the wood.  Not a good habit.

I gave them rubber tubs to play with and they have a round bale of hay to nibble on any time they want.  It has pretty much stopped the cribbing (chewing wood).  I don’t want to have them start up again.  But I don’t want wind whipping snow into the cozy barn, either!

When we were done, I threw a bale of grass hay into the donkey pen and goat pen so they had a cozy place to lay down when it was cold and stormy.  The stars were out bright and the wind had died down when we walked to the house.  I went in, but David went out and fired up his snowmobile and gave it a warm-up run.  If it snows like it’s supposed to, he’ll be out enjoying all our backwoods trails!  Brrrr.  I’ll throw another log on the fire.