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firewood moneypit
Wednesday, January 21 2009
Firewood costs real money, but the process of gathering and scrounging it is its own form of money pit. It's also a time pit and a dirtiness pit. I've been wondering if it wouldn't just be easier to outsource the gathering of firewood to a professional redneck and let him worry about mixing oil with fuel for his saws and splitting it into stove-sized pieces. A cord of wood is well less than $200, and I know I put more than that into the process of scrounging firewood even if I factor in a very modest wage for the time I spend on it.
Today I had another firewood money-pit incident while cutting up the recently-fallen White Pine (the one that took out our power back on December 30th). I was using the 3 horsepower Remington electric chainsaw and perhaps pushing it a little too hard when it suddenly started working much more weakly than it had. It had also taken on the fragrance of an electrical fire. So I ripped it all apart, finding its armature and what not suprisingly easy to get to. Despite all that, I couldn't get it working the way it had. Also, something about the way I reassembled it caused one of the carbon brushes to explode and catch on fire. (Burning brush carbon is a much better smell than burning plastic insulation, though neither is an indication that your electrical tools have much of a future.)
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