how many cords per truck load?

[redneck]

My friend is buying a few tractor trailor loads of firewood tree length.  He asked me how many cords per truck load.  i told him that it is hard to measure exactly untill cut up and pilled
up in rows 4 feet high.  however i would guess that a tractor trailer with three axles could handle about 12 cord and a tandem load about 8 cords does that seem right?? maybe he should pay by the ton and weigh the loads?

[SwampDonkey]

Your guestimate is same as here. I've never been cheated on 12 cord per TT load here, often a 1/4 a cord over. We hauled aspen one winter and it seems to average 8 cord on a tandem Chevy 13 speed.

[fuzzybear]

Estimates depend on species, amount of moisture,ect.  I load standing dead spruce onto a 45' tractor trailer. The most I can put on in tree length is 20 cords. If I cut 8' length I can squeeze on 25. But that is A LOT of weight, and alot of chaining.

[SwampDonkey]

redneck, call the marketing board, see what they say. I know some guys can get on 16 cord, but it's over weight and not legal and no loader mounted on the truck. The average seems to be around 32 tonnes with self loaders, seen some over weight at 40 tonnes (no loader). 2.5 tonnes per cord green hardwood (maple, beech, yellow birch).

[Clark]

My experience as a pulp scaler is that if you average ~12 cords per truck, that is about right.  Now, weight restrictions can come into play also.  I was scaling in WI and 12 cords was pretty average, had I been in MN it would have been closer to 10 because of weight restrictions (so the truckers told me...)  This was all 100" hardwood pulp.

I could be wrong but I would expect the average to be slightly lower with tree-length , unless the tops are dragging on the ground! 

Clark

[Gary_C]

Minnesota and Wisconsin are about the same for truck weights with some exceptions and there are a bunch of those.

For general numbers my tractor trailer weighs about 32,000 empty, no loader, and normally I can haul 80,000 max with a five percent allowance or 84,000. So that is about 52,000 payload or 26 tons. In the winter under frozen road conditions, that goes up by 10 percent or to 92,400 lbs, 30 tons. The difference between states can be because it is nearly impossible to get across the line without going interstates and the feds do not allow the tolerances and the 10 percent increase only with a permit.

Loaders on the trailer can add 6-10,000 lbs to a trailer depending on the size and age of the loader.

In Mn you now can use three axle trailers and with a permit you weight up to 90,000 gross plus five in the summer and another plus ten in the winter. But not on the interstates at all, even with a permit.   

So then the number of cords depends on the species with aspen at 2.25 tons per cord and maple/oak at 2.4 tons per cord. Basswood as another example is 1.9 tons per cord and pine is scaled at 2.2 I think.

[SwampDonkey]

Redneck is in my neck of the woods, so he's in line with my experience for here. He's not loading aspen and basswood for firewood.  But, Gary your mills are pretty much in line with the weights we use here and in Eastern Maine.

[SwampDonkey]

Hmm, let me refrain, yours are short ton, mine metric tonne. So, there is a difference of 500 lbs on the hardwood, and 450 lbs on the aspen or are your mills weighting in metric? Maine uses short tons, I assume the same out your way. Boils down to our discussions on converting a weight to a volume that is not solid wood. But, anyway as I said earlier, I've never been cheated on the conversions we use.

[SwampDonkey]

Season is also a factor in weight, one of the mills here also had seasonal adjustments for weight.  And further still, freshness of the wood being hauled. Seems like nickle and diming, but anyway to steal a buck. Heck next they'll want to deduct lignin content.

[Gary_C]

   Did you ask something or are you just ruminating?   

[SwampDonkey]

Where's the oats.

[barbender]

At UPM Blandin, if I am in the #100,000 range, they scale it about 14 cords on aspen, truck is around 38,000 depending on how much fuel I have on. Hey, that makes 2.2 tons, close to what Gary said. I think he's off on the Pine though, I think that is 2.4 per cord, Red Pine anyhow. That stuff is deceptively heavy, very easy to get overloaded, especially with saw bolts.

[SwampDonkey]

We use 2.25 ton or 2 metric tonne for spruce. Red pine and balsam fir are heavier, red pine a touch more so. Red pine is almost as heavy as hard maple, so your on track I'd say. For some reason the pulp mills think our hardwood has more water. But as I indicated, some mills will find a way to skim the cream, just like contracting potatoes to a processor. That's why some are now bankrupt for skimming too much from locals and increasing their procurement costs from further afair.

[redneck]

we looked at some of the loads, and talked to another person  who has cut and split a load and ended up with  about 12 cords.  so i think my friend is happy with paying for 12 cords per load 
thanks  for the help
Redneck

[barbender]

Yep SwampDonkey, the first time I hauled Red Pine I couldn't believe how heavy it was. I didn't realize how much of a difference it made with the wood being green I mean, everyone knows Red Oak and Hard Maple are way heavier than pine, right? Well, yeah, when it's dry they are way heavier, but not green. I don't know the moisture content of that Red Pine as a percentage, but it's way up there. I know my outdoor boiler burns green wood of all species no problem, except for Red Pine, that just makes huge clouds of steam

[dsgsr]

Speaking of weights of wood, What does Aspen/Poplar weigh. I tried the calculator on this forum and it reads 3900 lbs. per cord. If SwampDonkey is saying Spruce is 2.25 tons, Isn't Aspen/Poplar heavier than Spruce? Or am I missing something?

David

[Gary_C]

All the mills around here use 2.25 tons or 4500 lbs per cord for aspen. I don't know if that is right or not but that is what they use.

Most loggers feel they get screwed by that conversion and you do need to get that wood right in to the mill after cutting or you will lose moisture and money. It may well be bad for the logger, but weight conversions are a more uniform way of screwing the logger than stick scaling.

[SwampDonkey]

Mills here use 2.5 short tons or 2.27 metric tonne for aspen. The only reason we convert here is the loggers are mostly old school, and metric tonnes and m³ are meaningless to them. This with being metric since 1978. One of the troubles, well not really, but for lack of a phrase, is these border towns are so use to the US market and the logger pays his cutter based on a cord and the home owner wants a cord of stove wood. So........

I can see Gary's conversion used in winter because of seasonal moisture adjustment.

[rocksnstumps]

Looking at the load slips from a recent cutting on my land, the mills in central Wisconsin use a conversion of 2.4 for both hardwood and red pine pulp also. This is for what I guess you call a short ton, not metric anyway.

[thompsontimber]

Most loggers feel they get screwed by that conversion and you do need to get that wood right in to the mill after cutting or you will lose moisture and money. It may well be bad for the logger, but weight conversions are a more uniform way of screwing the logger than stick scaling.

   Certainly many loggers do feel that way.  You are right, at least it adds uniformity and everyone gets screwed equally.  Most mills buying by weight are simply pricing by the ton, but the real issues come about when stumpage is purchased on a cord basis and sold on a ton basis, only to have the timber buyer determine his own weight conversion.  I've heard stories of such things happening.  That's why each region has a standard conversion that is the legal conversion that must be followed in that area, and any other conversion could constitute timber theft.  In my area, the conversion is 2.675 tons or 5350 lbs per cord of pine and 2.9 tons or 5800 lbs per cord of hardwood (mixed, not broken down by species).  Is that conversion right?  well of course not, its gonna vary by species, age, size, moisture content, etc etc....but you gotta use those numbers, its standard. 

[SwampDonkey]

Since we were on the subject of red pine, there is one adjustment to the specific gravity of red pine figures in the Wood Handbook. Those figures are from 1978 keep in mind. It was brought to our attention that the specific gravity of red pine at 12% is not 0.46, but is 0.44. The published 0.46 is oven dry red pine. You know how sticky some professors can be with numbers and rounding and units and all that jazz. 

You'll notice that jack and red (being both hard pine) have similar numbers for specific gravity and lb/cu ft @ 12 % MC. Red is a lot heavier green though. Jack tends to grow in sand based soils around here. Red grows in red clay based soil around here.

[barbender]

Thompsontimber- I know that wood down your way is heavy, after running #102,000 loads of light wood up here, and then going down to Georgia and seeing the #80,000 loads go by, it looked like they only had half a load on!

[barbender]

 Up here the Red Pine and Jack Pine both tend to grow on sand, White Pine seems to do better in clayey soils. I've never hauled Jack Pine, hauled a load of big White Pine saw logs one time, they were light. It's pretty surprising how much the weight varies among just one species, I've been hauled aspen off of 4 or 5 different jobs this winter, the first 4 seemed about the same, this last one the aspen is a lot heavier. I'd venture a guess of #200 per cord heavier, just seems to have more moisture in it. You can see it in the log ends, the drier stuff looks kind of fuzzy, the wet stuff is a cleaner cut. This is all in frozen winter wood. I like Gary's theory, "a more uniform way of screwing the logger" I'd have to agree, but I guess I can't see the scalers at Sappi trying to keep up with all the trucks stick scaling. The lines get long enough as it is

[thompsontimber]

We are plenty jealous of those high weight allowances down here too barbender.  In big timber you really gotta be careful, can look like you don't have anything on but be overweight.  And those weigh men seem to sit around like snipers waiting for the kill around certain mills, and the overweight fines are plenty stiff.  Best to have on-board scales or scales in the woods, but with that added expense most folks get by with just guessing and trying not to press their luck.  Had our fair share that looked half loaded only to cross the scales at 95+ though.

[SwampDonkey]

We only find wild red pine here on clay soil high in iron (red soil). Even if there is some glacial till veneered near the surface of the soil profile it will be heavy clay underneath. Roads will have ruts as deep as a truck tire will allow on those types of roads in the wet season. Those areas occur along the Tobique watershed and down around Rusagonis and Salmon River if I recall. The range map shows it all over the province, but that's simply not fact. Sure it's been planted all over. I see in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence region it prefers sandy or gravelly soil. The soil where it grows here does have a lot of gravel mixed in the clay in places. But it's still a sticky soil that turns to snot when it gets wet. I've never recalled red mixed with jack pine, but I have seen it mixed with black spruce along the Waspske (part of Tobique watershed) on the Stewart Plain Reserve. I've been in vast jack pine forest and never another pine except white pine.

[barbender]

I'd love to see your country someday SD, I've never made it to the northeast (I guess you'd be southeast in Canada ) Red, Jack and white pine often grow together around here on sandy soil. On our property, which is a very fine grained sand, you will find all three. Plus balsam, white spruce, paper birch, bigtooth and quaking aspen, red and bur oak, soft maple, basswood, ironwood, and one lone white cedar. This is all natural regen after a forest fire I think. I know there was a big fire here years ago, you can still see huge old charred stumps. I just don't know if it was logged once in between now and then.

[SwampDonkey]

Well, there's room for one more I guess.