Missouri Face Cord

One of my "new" neighbors moved in a couple of years ago.  He is in his sixties and is very industrious.  Over the past few years I watched him build fire pits, strip down an RV trailer to make it a utility trailer and cut and split about six face cords of wood.

He got the wood from "town" after the summer wind storms.  He put a couple of hours a day into reducing it down burnable size.

Norway maple.

Today, I talked with him.  He is trying to sell it but it is not moving very fast.  I have a Craigslist account and offered to give him a hand selling it.  He agreed.

Turns out he moved here from Missouri.  He had driven around pricing the "competition".  The prices range from $40-to-$60 per face cord.  I use the term "face cord" loosely because many of these ricks are very short of a face cord.

For the uninitiated, a full cord is eight feet wide by four feet tall with the sticks being a minimum of 48 inches long.

A face cord is also eight feet wide and four feet tall.  The sticks can be any length although it is traditional to make them 16 inches long or three face cord to the full cord.

It is human nature to make the "face cord" a little less long and a little shorter. After all, cutting and stacking wood is hard work.  The FC shrinks until customers start to notice.  By eyeball, that would be 42" high by about six-and-a-half feet wide.  That shorts the customer by 30%.

Every customer knows the game.  They know they are getting screwed but they don't see that they have a choice.

Until today.  My neighbor and I invented the "Missouri Face Cord".  Missouri is "The Show Me" state.  It is a simple matter to have an eight foot and a four foot length of lumber available.  Show them what a real face cord looks like.  Mark it with a can of cheap spray paint.  Load it into the truck.

He is pricing it at $45 a "Missouri Face Cord."  It will be interesting to see how fast his stack of firewood moves.