Wood Collecting for the Axemen's Carnival

My first practice with the Rotorua Axemen’s Club was quite similar to my first practice with the Dartmouth Woodsmen’s Team, if they each could be called practice, as they both consisted of collecting rounds to be chopped later. After a short delay, rooted in the effect an accent can have on relaying street names, I was picked up by the Club president, Bevin Cavey, and we met up with half a dozen other axemen of the Club. Thus gathered, we proceeded south in a caravan of pickup trucks (called ‘utes’ down there, for ‘utility vehicles’) and trailers. Our task? To retrieve some poplar logs kindly donated for the upcoming Axemen’s Carnival at the Agricultural and Pastoral (A&P) Show. The logs came from a no longer needed farm windbreak, which another Club member had felled and bucked the week before, and lay as they fell. We started by extracting, with hooks and rolling, the rounds we wanted from their entangling brush. The rounds were each marked with their tree of origin and order within the tree, to best match up the rounds for events.

Rolling the rounds out into the field for pick up through the neighboring paddock was a maze, avoiding the deposits made by the recently vacated cows. It made little difference for the bark, however. All of the rounds were of a more than adequate size, and some were even too big to fit in the lathe. Thus, we determined the range of sizes we needed, drew rough circles a few inches larger in radius than necessary, and split off the excess sides with axes and mauls. 

Rounds were rolled out of the brush and trimmed of excess mass

This was like an inverted giant dot split; chop everything outside of the line

We had enough rounds to fill every truck and trailer to overcapacity, and half of them had to make return trips. Bevin had been driving the tractor, piling the brush away from the logs, so he tossed me his keys to drive his truck out to the road. He was off to park the tractor before I could point out my inexperience, so I carefully drove across the field for my first and only time operating a manual transmission with my left hand. Back at the fairgrounds, where the meet would be held and we collected the wood, the club had a large lathe. One by one we loaded crude-split rounds into its jaws and set the proper stop points for the blade, and then the large gas engine started spinning them. Back and forth the blade moved across the log, sending showers of wood shavings like confetti arching up into the sky. 

With showers of shavings crude rounds are spun into blocks for chopping

Occasionally the blade would dig too deep and send a larger chunk of wood rocketing a dozen metres, but luckily no one was hit. In the end we had many dozens of rounds shaved into perfect cylinders, then packed in their own sawdust to keep then fresh and wet for the next week’s chopping. It took longer than expected, and I didn’t end up getting any competitive chopping or sawing practice, but it was still a great day. 

Amassed fresh blocks assembled at the fairgrounds