A sawbuck is intended to make life easier, get the wood off of the ground, eliminate rock or dirt contact (save your chain) and be easier on your back.

Off the Charts heavy!

I built this project and used it in real time. It was off-the-charts-heavy, and surprisingly hard to use. Of course it would have made it easier if I had a tractor to relocate it, but that wasn't the only issue. It also took a long time to construct.

Hop-Poles - (not a hops endorsement - just a firewood source)

In the image below, you are looking at long pole style logs - for these, this version of a sawbuck would work great. I almost pot a load or two of hop-poles made out of lodge pole but I changed my mind - and this would have been perfect size though I would have had to cut them to length.

Chainsaw size

I found that when using small diameter wood, the "limbs" would jump around too much.  In some circumstances you could use a rachet strap to keep wood in one place, but the point of the sawbuck is also speed - and rachet straps don't produce that. If I used a low power chain saw, the bar wasn't long enough to stretch across the saw buck. If I used a 25" bar on a Stihl 391, there was too much power for the smaller wood so I moved down to an MS180 (right saw for the right size of wood).

Cleanup

In addition, the trimmed pieces that fell through the rack were extremely hard to clean up. I should have put plywood over the bottom "shelf" so the pieces were easier to remove. I was laughing as I made this adjustment for V1-0-3 because its almost nice enough to add to your dining room now (referring the bottom), well maybe not quite. With a rake, trimmed pieces are easy to scrape out for cleanup. I left the logs elevated in mid-air on purpose so you could see how the "under carriage looks."

Other Improvements

Adding a toe kick feature would have helped some to get closer to the sawbuck. That would take a bit of thought before the redesign. For this model you really want to get the kinks out before you convert it to a parametric model.

Feedback

If you have any ideas on how to improve this model - leave a comment at the bottom of the page and we will do a follow up in a future issue. If you would like to submit your own project with MathCompiler3D - you can zip up the Data Model and submit it to Contact@MathCompiler3D.com