Remember how we needed to turn those piles of logs into fields of logs, so that we could peel them? Now it's time to do that. There are a handful of ways to do this, and the more space you have in which to work, the easier it is to do. While the building site is 3 acres, most of it is lightly wooded, so there's not much room to skid logs around behind the truck or anything like that. That being the case, I opted to hire an excavation company - the same folks who will dig and pour my foundation, incidentally - to bring out one of their pieces of machinery, and move my logs around for me.
The excavator folks met up with me around 9am and got started almost immediately, since from an earlier visit they had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted done. The oak trees in pile #4 were already up on rails, but I needed them spread out into a layer only 1 log tall so all of them were easily accessible. Then, I wanted the logs from piles #3, #2, and #1 racked up in a certain order so that no log had to be handled twice, and each log was moved a minimum distance.
Here, the excavator operator has jsut finished unpiling the oak logs and turned them into the beginnings of Rack #1. In the second photo, I decided to get a little closer - something I tried not to do too often, due to the occasional wild bouncing of a log as he was putting it down.
For the most part, the plan worked. A few piles had fewer or more trees than we guessed, so there was a little bit of time wasted walking the excavator back and forth across the yard (it walked about the same speed that I do when I'm tired; fairer to say that it ambled) but on the whole, it was a pretty efficient operation.
Here I'm standing on the oaks at the end of Rack #1, looking along its length at aaaaaall the trees lined up before me.
At some point almost exactly 8 hours in, the pivot pin that attached the bucket/scoop to the excavator arm lost its split pin, and backed out out of half the joint. He was holing a log at the time, so the weight of the log bent the still-attached half of the joint - we tried to use the weight of the machine to re-align the pin but there was no luck on that front. So, he had to pack up and take the excavator back to the shop to get it repaired. At that point, however, he had finished up piles #3 and #2 and had gotten started on pile #1 - he had just started on a fourth log rack, and had probably 100-105 logs racked already. He told me he'd come back soon to finish the job - I didn't figure it would be that weekend, but that was fine because he knew what he was doing at that point and he'd be able to finish up with no trouble.
Here, I am standing on Rack #1, looking over it at the ends of the logs of Rack #3
Here's rack #1, complete, and behind it and barely visible, all of Rack #2...
On the right, below, is Rack #3, and to its left, the beginnings of Field #4. This is about where things died when the pin came out of the excavator's pivot.
Peeling the bark off a log!...