Using a Pickeroon - August 8, 2020 @goldenoakfarm

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My husband had a conversation a while back with the sawmill owner up on Horse Mountain. They were talking about doing wood for heat. The owner showed my husband 2 tools that he’d never heard of. They are called pickeroons and are made by the Peavey Company.

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He immediately came home and ordered them. There are 2 lengths, the short one he’s using here, and a longer one for moving the big chunks to a pile.

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Basically, it means not having to bend over and lift wood.

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He says it makes a HUGE amount of difference in wood handling.

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With arthritis in his hips and shoulders, anything that helps with handling wood is welcome!

The tip can be slightly peened over to a hook for better holding power. That’s what the sawmill owner did to his.

You drive the tip into the wood and just carry it where you need it. A twist and it drops out.

He can’t believe that after 40 years of burning wood he’d never heard of them. But he sure is glad to have them now.

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My hubby uses the axe to the same effect. We've also never heard of these! He's not sure if they'd actually be able to go into some of the hard gums we have here, but thinks they'd do okay with softer woods.

We only burn the hardwoods, and so far, it's worked great!

Some of the woods we get, the axe bounces right off! The chainsaw blade doesn't last long either. We make as few cuts as possible with them, then squeeze them into the woodburner. 🤣

My husband saw your first response and said the sawmill owner thought he had fixed that problem by sharpening the tip a little and giving it a slight hook by peening. But I doubt he has gum trees up here... :))

One of the red gums is so hard that the first time I encountered it I thought it was a brick, quite literally. It had been cut into brick shapes, was red and even had the weight of a brick. I kept picking it up and double checking that it really did have grain! 😆 I was so puzzled as to why hubby had put a pile of bricks by the fire and he thought it was hilarious! 😂

We had a couple of these growing up. I don't recall ever having used them. We also had what i think is called a skidder.

It's a pole with a hook loosely attached to it. You get the hook over a log or limb and it pinches that between the hook and the pole so you can drag it out of a pile.

I believe that tool is called a log peavy.

Yes, we've had one of those for moving the logs, just never came across pickeroons before.

Heating with wood is a lot of hard work, especially when you're not so young anymore... Bending over with a chainsaw is something I try not to do these days because of my back. I don't heat with wood anymore, but for the 20 years that I lived in the country on the homestead, wood heat was all we had. Back in the 1980s and 90s...
I like wood heat, but I wouldn't want it to be the only means of heat now, too much work for this old body...

That's one of the reasons we put in a masonry heater. It uses about half the wood of a wood stove, and you can burn any type of wood safely.