The outside ones keep the logs from comming back and sitting in my lap. They also have a chain hook attached. The center one has two chain hooks attached for use as shown in this picture.
Egon
Am curious and wondering why the wide faces? The best (highest quality) wood is just under the bark, so unless a very wide face is desired, then narrower faces would turn that high quality wood into lumber (unless you can resaw the slabs that were removed) and not firewood.
I don't mean to sound hard on you for what you did, and I don't care what you do with your own wood, but if others are reading about this technique, seems additional information on what is possibly happening in this thread could be useful.
Presawing faces will also cause the wood's surface to start drying and begin checking, as the wood at the face will want to shrink, but cannot because the wood underneath that face cannot shrink. The checks are there permanently, so wood for furniture or the like is lost to the checking that happens. Getting fresh-sawn lumber in a pile for air drying evenly on both faces is important to retaining high quality wood for further use. Although, if the wood is to be used for construction purposes, the surface checking does not matter as much, although the straightness of the piece does enter into the formula.
Those logs were not very straight and are off very poor quality. There was not much lost with the slabs. If they had been better logs a bandsaw mill would have been brought in.