Felling and floating timber
a vintage video about Norwegian forestry
Each spring - the month of May seems to be the worst - I lose all inclination to write trite treatises on woodworking, tools and techniques. Instead of trying to write anything coherent or sensible, I’ll embed a YouTube video (you know you don’t have to watch all those commercials, right?) about how they used to fell and float timber here in Norway back in the fifties.
I share it because I like it, and I like it because I’m interested in history; in how they used to do things before we had so much energy at our disposal that we could overpower any problem instead of understanding it.
They had to work with the grain of things back then.
Lest you get the wrong end of the stick: I do emphatically not romanticize the hard and often quite dangerous work shown in this video.
This is how we do it these days:
It’s obviously immensely efficient, but why do I think of rape?
For timber belongs to the ever returning spring on earth.
It grows from sources that the destroyer has not
yet reached.
***
Two very different worlds there. Machines will get it done faster, but you lose a lot in the experience. That being said, the new battery saws are actually bordering on usable for small scale forestry work ( < 380mm) and they're a step closer back to how it used to be done. Just you, the birds, the sound of fibres severing, tearing and being pulled apart. But for anything larger, give me my chainsaw. One thing I don't do though is petrol station fuel. Aspen / Motomix all the way for my saws. Smells better, doesn't give you headaches and it will give you more life from your saws.
However, twos tool that gets used EVERYDAY - my axe and my knife. If push came to shove I could do it all (slowly) with those two tools - πολύ καλά