Moving wood bundles

[dan]

Don't have help so I'm doing it myself.

Piled up 3 to 4 feet high by about 20 feet long wood bundles pulled out of the back yard unused acreage. Bundles are a mix of everything you can imagine from thin stalks to 8 inch deadwood logs. Craggy as all hell.

Don't want to just throw it over the hillside dropoff (the purpose of clearing the dead wood is for a free fire protection program which will chip as much as I can give them but it has to be where they want it to be and it's not yet there).

I have to move these bundles hundreds of feet to the pickup point. Just asking for ideas.

First I tried the wheelbarrow but that will take forever even on paved ground. Nothing fits. Average is three times the length of a barrow.

Then I tried the blue tarps and bungees but the brand new 9mil tarp wore out a 2 foot diameter hole in the middle on the first run.

Now I'm using ropes but I wish I had thought about them first as it's best done when I lay rope on the ground and pile the wood bundles on top before dragging. For now I have the rope knotted into a big ball on one end of a pipe which I shove (bangalore style) under the pile and then wrap it around the middle and drag.

Rope dragging worked much better than the rest of the ideas so far.

The wood chippers are coming in a few days so I'm just asking for advice on how to move large piles of wood of various sizes long distances by hand.

[rbowman]

Big, cheap tarp? Nail on side to a 2x4 and create a harness with a length of line so you can drag it.

[gfretwell]

A trailer?

[Dan Espen]

I have to do this twice a year. Each year I create a pile as tall as I am at the curb. I still haven't found anything better than carrying a few at a time. Get all the thick ends pointing one direction, wrap my arms around as many as I can and drag them out.

A few years I spent an hour or 2 with a loper cutting off all the side branches and cutting them to 6 ft or so. Then they can go in the wheel barrow. Not sure if that actually saves time.

[Ed Pawlowski]

With the larger diameter pieces, how about cutting to size and they wheelbarrow.

[dan]

Ours is once a year. It's nice they do free wood chipping. It's not so nice that my boys are all off at college now so I'm alone. (My food bill went to almost nothing the instant they left the house!)

I forgot to mention that like your wood chippers mine are picky in that all the cut ends need to be facing the road and the wood needs to be perpendicular to the curb and all bundles must be on the downhill side of the road but no more than 3 feet in from the road.

They'll take up to 8 inches though.

The length of some of these is twenty and thirty feet long but most are around six to ten feet long (almost all was dead or dying weeds, bushes, brush, and some trees).

I could cut them into neat sizes but that's thousands more cuts than I want to do just to move them a few hundred feet to where the chippers can get at them.

I'm learning though that laying a lattice of rope (doesn't need many strands) and then repositioning them onto that lattice works best.

Dragging that lattice isn't too bad (and not too hard on the rope if I can try to position the rope so that it's mostly not touching the ground when dragging (but it's a bit more work to do as I wore out the rope on one trip before I realized that trick).

I wish I had known to lay the rope BEFORE I made these huge piles. (I don't own a trailer but the terrain is not conducive to vehicles anyway.)

[Dan Espen]

I have all those same restrictions about thick end to the curb, etc.

I have to get mine through a 4 ft wide gate so your rope trick won't work for me.

I have one of those lopper trimmers, cutting off all the side branches takes some time but isn't impossible.

[rbowman]

I take it you can't get a burn permit. Wood ash is good fertilizer so you could spread it on the lawn to return the elements to the soil.

[invalid unparseable]

I did burn a massive great pile of mine but it didn?t make any difference to the area the ash was spread on compared with the rest that didn?t have the ash spread on it.

[Scott Lurndal]

Chippers are mobile, designed to be moved to the wood, not vice versa.

[dan]

You seem to understand that they need easy access within 3 feet of a roadway but that GETTING the wood to there is the hard part in some areas.

I wore out three pairs of leather gloves working on this one project alone!

They're coming very soon (I have a period of three days they can come) so I worked all weekend on it. I could show pictures but you know pretty much what it's like to drag, push, trundle, gather, and carry wood hundreds of feet.

The rope trick is what's working best given how craggy the wood is (it's entire small dead trees). The logs aren't as susceptible to sticking together like a mass of velcro as the bushes and brush is though so I used the wheelbarrow for the logs (it can handle six foot logs).

For the vines of poison ivy I had to use the loppers because they won't take the stuff nor will they take common weeds with seeds like many brooms. For the vines I had to lop them to fit in the green landscape garbage bins but they're not supposed to take them either (nobody wants them).

I also found an old 1977 quarter. How much do you think it's worth? ;-/ (Maybe I can buy a pair of 1977 leather gloves for that much?) ;-0

[gfretwell]

How close can you get a truck? I have had great luck hooking a long rope to things like this and dragging them out. It is best to use a chain to wrap the logs with tho. It won't wear out dragging along the ground. After Irma I dragged all of this up to the curb.

[TimR]

I have a child's cheap plastic sled I use for that kind of thing. It's light plastic, about 2 feet wide by 4 foot long, shaped like a shallow bathtub. It drags fine if you don't put too much weight on it. (I loaded my bags of concrete mix on it, then I had to unload them all when it wouldn't move. But lighter stuff is okay.)