Fire Felling a Tulip Tree for a Dugout Canoe

[wallacewithoutgromit]

I would think you would want and the Native Americans had a "tag Line" several tens of feet up in that tree to control when and where it fell. Thus would considerably reduce accidents and hang ups in other trees.

[Verradonairun]

great, now you can move on to burning an indentation in the log :D lol, takes too long!!!! besides isn't the circumference of the tree to small for a canoe?

[loosanarrow]

We did just that. Check the website - video of burning logs just is not very exciting. Burning removes about 2 cm (3/4 inch) per 1 1/2 hour burn. Most dugouts are less than 30 cm (12 inches) deep, and have a 3 to 5 cm (1 to 2 inches) thick bottom, so one must only do about 12 to 15 burns, and this was done in about 3 days of work. I suppose it depends on what one considers "too long". As for the tree size, again, check out the pictures on the website. Many are larger, but many are also narrower.

[Verradonairun]

okay...now that you said 3 days of work it doesn't seem like too long, however I can think of 1 other way to do it, which requires less material, time and effort.

[dramsey2k4]

cool idea, but do you see the irony in using saw cut wood as fuel?

[loosanarrow]

Indeed. Our intent here was not to explore gathering firewood without steel tools, but in the course of other projects we have gathered wood fuel without steel tools and there is actually not much difference in total effort required to gather the wood - it is simply moved in longer lengths and burned into separate pieces on the fire or fed into the fire one end first. Good observation though. Other projects show that the amount of wood used here could be gathered by a group of ten in hours nosaw

[RubyRedRose1]

I was part of the first year they did a burnt out canoe. Mr. Finney does a great job I loved our canoe. I bet Mr. G was excited too!

[JaasterMareel]

ok it was kinda cool! but what keept you from using an axe or a saw, to get that tree down?

[loosanarrow]

Nothing - other than we wanted to try fire.

[loveandanarchy1111]

That is so cool!.....

[Delticola]

I can appreciate the desire to make a dug out canoe, I tried it once for a little while on a tree that was alread fallen. But are you sure tulip wood is acceptable for such a project? And after all that did you complete the work or not?

[loosanarrow]

Around here tulip is the most common wood used for dugouts that have been recovered. Up north white pine is preferred, down south yellow pine seems preferred - we did finish - see pics at our websites listed in the more info section.

[frogsheath]

Cool video. I like the sound of what seems like a train in the distance.