Ratio of solid to airspace in stacked firewood cord calculation?

[farmer steve]

He’s around but unfortunately for us chose to move operations into the political forum.

one thing will bring @Whitespider out of P/R forum. BIAS TIRES!!!!

 

[Whitespider]

one thing will bring @Whitespider out of P/R forum. BIAS TIRES!!!!

LOL

I didn’t know he moved for sure?

Yep, I'm currently (and temporarily) a town dweller... I was bored to the point of insanity until I purchased a pontoon early this summer, I spend my time on the river fishing to ease the pain.
My wood furnace is in storage, my saw has only been used once in the last year, and dad took the splitter to the lake home this spring.

That's odd. In soil, the smaller the grains the less the airspace and more dense the material.

That's not quite the same thing because soil contains multiple types of materials, some of which will filter in between the grains, and some which is somewhat elastic or semisolid allowing it to change shape to fit available space between solid grains.
Look at it this way...
If you had a bolder the size of, say a car, and broke it up into irregular pieces the size of, say a basket ball... which will occupy more space, the bolder or the pile of rocks??
*

 

[svk]

He’s alive!

 

[cumminstinkerer]

welcome back spidey

 

[SamT1]

I think big rounds have more air in it than anything else. What I call rough split has the least. Split small in the middle somewhere.

I used to sell a Woodyard loads of roughsplit, I could haul 4, but he paid me for 4.5 because after they split it it made 5. But I’ve sold loads of unsplit big round pecan and had customers mad because it only made 3.75 once split, then again that was just one guy so who knows. I don’t sell the tiny split stuff so I don’t know about that. I like mine to last in the fireplace.

 

[Snap]

That's not quite the same thing because soil contains multiple types of materials, some of which will filter in between the grains, and some which is somewhat elastic or semisolid allowing it to change shape to fit available space between solid grains.
*

"Semisolid" soils?
No such thing as a gradation test on water content.
Back to the original point , fine grained materials will fall into place with less air than large grained materials.

 

[CaseyForrest]

"Semisolid" soils?

Yes, consistency of soil, Atterberg Limits.

Back to the original point , fine grained materials will fall into place with less air than large grained materials.

They wont do it on their own without roughly 7 years to reach original density and they wont do it without moisture.

But that's an apples and oranges comparison... Take a piece of wood with a known volume and split it in half. Now try to get it back into a package with the same volume as the unsplit piece. Split wood is like a puzzle that just doesn't go back together quite right. Generally speaking.

 

[turnkey4099]

That's odd. In soil, the smaller the grains the less the airspace and more dense the material.

It seems odd but true. A stack of rounds will expand by about 10-15% after splitting and restacking, the smaller the splits the more it expands.

 

[turnkey4099]

California Dept of Weights and Measures states 30%. I am not sure what it means any more because what I went through a number of years ago does not seem to be relevant today. Most folks deliberately cut sloppy so more space is evident. Thanks

The definition of cord way back when was "4'x4'x8' or 128 cu ft well stowed (stacked) so that a mouse can run through but the cat can't follow"

I saw that in some book back abut the 60s.

I find that I sstack much tighter when hand splitting vs using log splitter. I take more time placing pieces as I stack after splitting each chunk.

 

[turnkey4099]

That is correct. The more splits that you have the more air that will be present and the less mass and weight that your truck will be hauling.

One time I packed my truck with big dry rounds already cut to length that I split immediately and set aside as I unloaded. Then I tried to load the splits back into the truck. At least 20% of them could not be packed right back into the truck along with the scree that the log splitter generated. I saved those splits for my next delivery and saved the scree for kindling.

I showed my wife a simulation using raw carrots and a mason jar. We packed the jar tight with large carrots, unpacked them, and then sliced them up with a food processor. It was impossible for her to get all the sliced carrots back into the jar.

take a box lid, cut thin rounds off of carrots, put as many as you can into the lid, dump out, cut each round into halves and repack into the lid. They won't fit no matter how you work at it unless you put every 1/2 chunk mated to it's other half.

 

[turnkey4099]

Is that the thread where someone got load of dowels, packed a box to full, then re packed with smaller diameter dowels and showed less wood fitted in the box? that's the opposite of my experience when i pile bucked rounds up at the end of my plle, and then go at the splitting and stacking, the stack of splits is always considerably shorter/denser. there are so many factors though...are all the rounds the same size or is there variation? do you stack carefully, using small ones to fill the gpas? are they straight? are they all the same length or does variation cause more gaps? however, if we take a regular shape like the dowel, a triangle (rough approximation for a split) will tessellate much more densely than circles. I guess what I'm saying is, it varies loads and your experience may not match my own or anyone else's

nope. Only if you stack them back into the round shape they started with.

 

[turnkey4099]

No, I was writing about uncompacted material. Think of 2" stone vs 1/2" stone. The small stuff naturally falls in close whereas a pile of the big stuff is full of voids.

You will, with an accurate measure find that a bucket of large chunks of rocks will not fit back into the bucket after grinding them smaller. The 'lots of little' voids add up to more than the big voids you had.

 

[Franny K]

How about coffee beans vs ground.
I do not have a rock grinder handy.
I was most seriously overloaded with sand not crushed stone. The stone was limestone, the sand concrete sand as opposed to Mason sand.
There is the effect of a wall or boundary. If 2 or 3 or 4 rocks fills the bucket and they are crushed to pea sized who thinks the bucket will be full.

One firewood seller has divider in his dump truck, says it is so he can do half loads. Seems a way to lessen amount to me.

 

[Wood Doctor]

How about coffee beans vs ground.
I do not have a rock grinder handy.
I was most seriously overloaded with sand not crushed stone. The stone was limestone, the sand concrete sand as opposed to Mason sand.
There is the effect of a wall or boundary. If 2 or 3 or 4 rocks fills the bucket and they are crushed to pea sized who thinks the bucket will be full.

One firewood seller has divider in his dump truck, says it is so he can do half loads. Seems a way to lessen amount to me.

The coffee beans grind down about 100 to one or more (100 grounds per bean). That cancels out almost all the air space between the beans. That's like making sawdust out of a firewood round.

When you split logs, you don't get 100 logs out of a 1 cu-ft round or even a 2 cu-ft round. So, the air space is still everywhere between the firewood splits and that exceeds the air space between the rounds.

 

[Franny K]

This thread got pretty well answered early on. It did not even involve rounds and how they might stack.