I’ve been trying to obtain a very large piece of wood for a project. It turns out that getting a piece of wood that’s 36 inches in diameter and three or four feet long isn’t all that easy if you don’t know an arborist. I got a call from a friend of a friend, somebody who had cut a tree down for a customer and wondered if I was interested in it.

I arranged to go get the trailer that the trunk was on and bring it home to dump the log on my driveway. This is Ash, about 4-1/2 feet long and between 36 and 40 inches in diameter. I estimated the weight at 2,000 lbs. I unloaded it by wrapping a chain around the log and then pulling the trailer out from under it.

My plan for the log is a big carved chair, and the base for a large coffee table. But the first thing was to get it cut into two pieces. My chainsaw is only 16″, so there’s no way I can get even close to a reasonable cut. So I had to get the log onto my trailer and up to the sawmill. Trouble is, I don’t have anything that can lift that kind of weight.

But I do have some simple machines and a little ingenuity.

I positioned my hydraulic jack under the front of the log and jacked it up in small increments, bracing it as I went along.

When I got it high enough, I replaced the hydraulic jack with a farm jack. That solved most of the lifting problem, but I had to be careful to brace the back so the log didn’t roll to one side or the other. It wasn’t difficult to get the log up to the required height and braced securely.

The next morning I hand-positioned the trailer under the log and stated loading. The idea here was to wrap a chain around it and pull it onto the trailer with a hand winch (what we call a “come along”). The only twist was that I didn’t have enough chain. Turns out that a 38-inch diameter log is just short of 10 feet in circumference. I had a 12-foot chain and the cable on the come along isn’t long enough to reach from the front of the trailer to the back. So I had to re-purpose my bicycle lock cable. Plenty strong enough: braided steel cable 3/8″ in diameter.

I made a few mistakes here that I will correct if I ever have to do something like this again. In particular, I should have put jack stands under the back of the trailer. I did eventually, but before I did the weight of the log put a lot of stress on the trailer hitch ball and receiver up front. Had that failed, the back of the trailer would have come down, potentially crushing my foot or anything else that was under it.

After getting the trunk onto the sleds, it was easier than expected to winch it up onto the trailer. I had to disconnect and re-position the winch at one point, and jack up the back so I could get another sled in position, but there weren’t any real surprises.

At this point all I had to do was tie it down for the trip to the sawmill. I suppose I could have done a better job of centering the log over the wheels. The log weighs 2,000 lbs., and the trailer is only rated at 3,500. But it towed okay.

All told, loading this log onto my trailer took about four hours of work, most of which was spent figuring out what to do next. Having never done anything like this, I was extra careful about making sure everything was secure. I didn’t want a ton of wood to come crashing down on me.

Don’t underestimate the power of simple machines. The most complicated piece of equipment I used here was that hydraulic jack, and I could have done without it, substituting a lever and fulcrum. Replacing the farm jack would have been more difficult, but again possible with levers. Nothing I did required a lot of physical effort. The most taxing part of the whole thing was operating the winch. Even so, somebody half my size likely could have done it.