A Mill-Slab Firewood Business

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CUTTING AND HANDLING

You'll want to custom-cut slabs to fit each customer's stove. It's entirely possible for a modern mill-slab fuelwood dealer to serve the trade with nothing more costly or complicated than a brace of sturdy sawhorses and a bucksaw—the way Great Granddad did it. But even if you prefer to go modern, you certainly won't have to acquire a cordwood dealer's large chain saws, a tractor-PTO-powered buzz saw, or a gas-fueled log splitter to cut up slabs. All you need is a pair of sawhorses the width and height of the bed of your truck (or trailer) and a medium-sized chain saw or a good portable electric circular saw. In my experience, the circular saw is the better tool.

After parking your slab-loaded truck on level ground, arrange the sawhorses behind it. If you have a sheet of heavy plywood just lying around, position it atop the horses and tack it down with a few nails to form a worktable. Otherwise, simply lay enough slabs of the same thickness across the horses, flat sides up, to provide a work surface, and nail them in place. Now all you have to do is pull a slab at a time off the back of the truck, position it on the worktable, and cut it into stove-length pieces.

A high-quality, 7-1/2" or larger, hand-held electric circular saw cuts slabs as well as does a chain saw—and at a considerable reduction in purchase, operating, and maintenance costs, while also reducing noise and eliminating gasoline fumes.

The industrial-quality, worm-drive models provide higher torque at lower speeds and thus are better suited for cutting slabs than are the smaller, direct-drive saws. The trouble is, such heavy-duty saws cost $125 and up, while dependable direct-drive models can be purchased for a fraction of that amount.

Any general-purpose circular saw blade will cut slabs; a carbide-tip blade will last practically forever—but again, you must pay for the added quality. Pick your poison.

Slabs will run from splinter-thin kindling to sections that are four to six inches thick and up to a foot or more in width. Start by cutting a good supply of a variety of thicknesses of slab chunks into the most common stovewood lengths—12, 14, and 16 inches—to sell out of stock. Keep in mind that what mill slabs lack in thickness, they make up for in heater-loading maneuverability; with a little practice (and perhaps some coaching from you), your customers will be able to fill a firebox with more wood and less air space than is possible with cordwood.

With each order, ask for the dimensions of the stove's firebox and door, and cut your wood so that it will fit easily through the door but still fill the firebox as completely as possible. For the deeper "box" stoves, you can cut slabs to one inch less than firebox depth. For the fireplace-type or Franklin stoves with wide, shallow fireboxes and doors that are smaller than the firebox area, you can cut slabs an inch or three wider than the door opening, so that the customer can angle the slabs in. In this case, the length of the slabs should equal the width of the door opening plus half the difference between the door width and the firebox width.

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