Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire February Firewood Festival

Woodshed is getting a little low. Time to re stock.



This big black walnut fell over in the meadow last June. No rot in the tree, it was growing right next to Bear Creek and the creek had undermined the roots.
Really big black walnut for around here, 26 inch diameter.




First cut is the trickiest, you can get the saw jammed up.



The Fiskars maul doesn't play games.





This drum gave me a hard time, I had to bust it with the 9 pound hammer and the steel wedge.
Once I had it in two pieces, the Fiskars finished the job. These are massive heavy drums, haven't lost a bit of water, probably 125 pounds each, some heavier than that. You have to split them anyway, why break your back loading up the truck? I busted them in to six, or eight pieces.



The trunk is in my truck. It puts a smile on my face to put a load of firewood into the Jap truck.

Couldn't that walnut be used for something else?

Kinda what I was thinking. Hell of a tree to use for firewood

Some make furniture from black walnut.
I burn it. Pretty good firewood.


This tree grew on the edge of a field, on the other side of the field is a house built in 1902, about the time this tree began growing.
No telling if fence staples etc. were driven into such a tree, so close to a house. In other words, somebody in 1940 could have driven a bunch of nails into this tree when it was 10 inches in diameter. Today those nails would be 8 inches deep into the wood and difficult to detect with a metal detector.
Sawmills do not want trees grown near houses, they want trees out in the middle of the forest.
Besides, I don't have a big truck to haul it to the sawmill, nor a lift machine to put it in a truck.

And no mill is going to come out for one log. No money in that. BCM

I burn them quite often

Nuisance level on the place here. Ain’t worth a sheeit unless they are straight which is tough because some old goober 100 years planted one in a yard for the nuts. And theyre all limby and crooked and have clothesline hooks/nails in them.

If you have a black walnut within 70 feet of your vegetable garden, the sap from the tree will kill all the vegetables, except for pole beans.
In Autumn, the nuts will land on your truck and make dents.

I have whacked a half dozen near my house for just these reasons. These trees were 17 inch diameter, not worth much at the sawmill.

Can you bbq with it? Sorry if that is a Dumass question!

Dried black walnut and coal burn about the same. We sold some 6 years ago and we are still cutting out the scraps for camp fires. You have to have a hot fire to start them or they just won't go.

kwg

This is what the mills are looking for.

Black walnut is way down the BTU list.

Osage orange, 32.9 BTUs per cord
Shagbark hickory, 27.7 BTUs per cord
Eastern hornbeam, 27.1 BTUs per cord
Black birch, 26.8 BTUs per cord
Black locust, 26.8 BTUs per cord
Blue beech, 26.8 BTUs per cord
Ironwood, 26.8 BTUs per cord
Bitternut hickory, 26.5 BTUs per cord
Honey locust, 26.5 BTUs per cord
Apple, 25.8 BTUs per cord
Mulberry, 25.7 BTUs per cord
Beech, 24 BTUs per cord
Northern red oak, 24 BTUs per cord
Sugar maple, 24 BTUs per cord
White oak, 24 BTUs per cord
White ash, 23.6 BTUs per cord
Yellow birch, 21.8 BTUs per cord
Red elm, 21.6 BTUs per cord
Hackberry, 20.8 BTUs per cord
Kentucky coffee tree, 20.8 BTUs per cord
Gray birch, 20.3 BTUs per cord
Paper birch, 20.3 BTUs per cord
White birch, 20.2 BTUs per cord
Black walnut, 20 BTUs per cord
Cherry, 20 BTUs per cord
Green ash, 19.9 BTUs per cord
Black cherry, 19.5 BTUs per cord
American elm, 19.5 BTUs per cord
White elm, 19.5 BTUs per cord
Sycamore, 19.1 BTUs per cord
Black ash, 18.7 BTUs per cord
Red maple, 18.1 BTUs per cord

Round oak, hauled some like that out of my buddy’s bush a couple weeks ago.

Brought this home for a coffee table today. It’s been drying 3 years.

Nice!

Yes, black walnut is 20 million BTU per cord, maybe 21 million depending on whose chart you use.
And red oak is about 24 million. White oak on most charts is about 26 million. Slight variances of course will occur on these charts.

So black walnut is not nearly as good as oak. And I burn a lot of oak.
On the other hand, this tree is just one mile from my house. Good point number one.
This tree can be driven right up to in my truck, Good Point number two. If I have access to a white oak, and it is 100 feet down a steep hillside, Forget It! Too much trouble.

Black walnut is easy to split and it looks funky and smells funky, I like to burn it. If I had easy access right now to some oak I would get it instead.
But I don't.

As for locust at 27 million, it is God's Gift to the wood stove guy. However, a blight 21 years ago killed all the locust up here and I have just about burned it all up.

So, up here in the NC mountains, those are my choices, oak, black walnut, and occasionally cherry. Love to burn cherry but it has about the same BTU as black walnut.
Not gonna burn poplar or white pine, got hundreds of those trees on my property, but low BTU.

I will use no wood with less BTU than black walnut but, all in all it is pretty good firewood. I can burn black walnut all day, and at 10 pm load the stove up with locust for the "all night burn."

I have too many fuel options to burn Black walnut. I share your love for Black cherry. I purposely mix it in with other fuel for its aromatic quality. So when outside I get a whiff of it near the house or cabin. In addition, I use it as a stove thermostat in a cook stove. If the room or building temperature gets too hot, I feed in Black Cherry (and/or Birch) to maintain a fire with a low BTU fuel, thus cooling down the heated area.

Why split on the ground instead of on another round?

Gotta be a lot of wasted energy on rebound.

The BTU chart is interesting, I didn’t know such existed though I don’t know why it wouldn’t.

I have a fire in the stove beside me as we speak and it’s loaded with black locust. We have a grove on the farm that’s probably 2 acres of telephone pole size trees. They rarely get bigger than that and are odd to cut. They may have one live limb 20’ up that’s big as your wrist, the rest of the tree will be shedding all the bark and dead. Saw it down and it’ll have a live strip about 2” wide on one side going to that limb. The rest of the tree may be dry and hard as a ball bat or turned to styrofoam and worthless. Only way to find out is to cut it up, sometimes half will be rotted and half will be good, or all one way or the other. I like cutting them because there’s very little limbing just cut to length and load it up.

I burn some pecan, it’s decent wood but goes to sawdust in a year if left with the bark on. Some kind of bug or larvae is either in them or gets in them. It’s generally not too bad to split, I’ll take the trunks to split and dad takes the smaller stuff for his fireplace.

We burn some walnut, lots of them between coffee can and washtub diameter growing on the creek. I like burning it but ours are generally twisted and springy, hard work with the maul.

Dad, Grandad, and one uncle who all have fireplaces and don’t split their wood prefer red elm. The bark slides right off so you don’t have that in the yard or on the patio. And they make a pretty fire with big dancing flames but still burn for a good while. What we call a slick elm is second place for them, same kind of bark and fire but not as hot or long lasting. A red elm that dies, sheds its bark, and leans up against another tree will last an eternity without rotting. The old weathered mossy looking ones are dad’s favorite, they’re hard as a stone and a beautiful red color.

My uncle and I burn stoves and we share the big red oaks that come down. Either erosion on the creek bank, wind, or ice usually gets one or two a year. Some of them are big enough to make a year’s worth of wood for us with our short winters. They stink like piss in pickle juice when green but split so easily. The smaller limbs the fireplace guys cut to their length and take. With all of us burning no good hardwood goes to waste out on the place.

Here’s an oak I’ve been working on. Got it pretty well cut up now and have been splitting and stacking it for next winter.
My helper. Not quite enough lead in his ass yet.
I thought these curlies were pretty cool looking though they suck to split.

We burn conifers or we don't heat with wood. Red fir and western larch are generally preferred but I'm satisfied with lodgepole pine. It was eighteen below this morning and it's 73 in the house so I reckon it's working ok. GD

Hmmmmmm, does not sound like the conditions of the Black locust in my neck of the woods. I cut them for fence posts and they last a very long time. Great firewood, too.