9^ FOREST commissioner's REPORT. 



veniencc in making and afterwards removing them. With this 

 method the men are paid by the day or month, and there is not 

 so heavy a cut per man as when the men work alone. It sel- 

 dom exceeds ij/ or 2 cords per day. This method is particu- 

 larly adapted to stands where the logs are too large for one 

 man to handle and where the birch is so scattered that one man 

 could not work to advantage by himself. 



A modification of the crew method is to remove the tree 

 stems to the place where they are to be piled before cutting them 

 into bolts. One man does all the chopping, but as soon as the 

 trees are felled and their tops cut off they are dragged, or 

 "twitched," to the piles and there cut into bolts by a saw crew. 

 This is "sawing at the yard" in contrast to "sawing at the 

 stump." It saves two handlings of the bolts, but it makes the 

 logs very gritty as they are dragged through the dirt, with sub- 

 sequent serious wear and tear on the saws at the mill. 



Still another modification of the crew method is to have crews 

 of only two or three men, in which each takes his turn at the 

 chopping, sawing, and piling. 



The wood is usually scaled and sold by the stacked cord. A 

 stack 8 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 4 feet high is scaled as i 

 cord without regard to its actual solid contents. Theoreticallv 

 a cord contains 128 cubic feet, but because of the numerous air 

 spaces the average solid content of a stacked cord of paper 

 birch spool stock is approximately 96 cubic feet, though this 

 varies considerably with different-sized bolts. The best way to 

 scale birch, therefore, is not b}' the stacked cord, but by the cubic 

 foot. This ma}- be done in two ways : By measuring each stick 

 and finding its solid contents from a table giving the contents 

 in cubic feet of sticks of different diameters ; or by esti- 

 mating the average size of the sticks and obtaining the solid 

 contents from a table giving the average contents of stacks 

 composed of different-sized bolts (as Table 8, on page ). 



In some localities the wood is first scaled in cubic feet by the 

 New Hampshire log rule, and this figure ' is then reduced to 

 cords by considering 128 cubic feet as equal to i cord. The 

 cubic foot given in the New Hampshire rule is merely an arbi- 

 trary standard and is not the true cubic foot. It is equal to 

 the contents of a log 16 inches in diameter and i foot long, or 

 actually 1.4 cubic feet. Consequently 128 of these so-called 

 cul)ic feet really contain 179 cubic feet. But since 96 cubic 



