Part of the deal with cutting down the trees involved cutting all the trees on the drain field and making sure that all the branches/trunks 2" or larger were set aside for firewood, smaller branches were disposed of in piles around the perimeter of the field. In total we wound up with 20 logs - ~11 ft in length and ranging in diameter from 14" to 24+". With the gracious help of two friends from church we moved the logs from the church site to our "milling site". The milling site was about 2 miles away in an open area of another woodlot. The effort to move the logs was almost herculean, 11 of the logs were loaded with a loader the remainder were loaded manually using chain falls, winches and jacks. The mill site looked like this after we got all the logs there. These were primarily oak - mostly white, a few red oak logs. In addition there were 4 soft maple logs - these logs have ambrosia beetle damage to them, making the boards interesting.
My friend Steve, who is the land owner at the mill site also had a few logs that he needed milled.
We were only able to do some of them as the maples in the middle were spalted and a few were too small in diameter to make it worth while to mill. However we did do the majority of them - cherry and walnut.
I hired Jim Hart - Brookside Farm Sawmill to bring in his portable sawmill. He was scheduled to arrive at 8:30am, I got there a half hour early figuring on standing by the road ready to stop traffic while he turned into the site. But I barely got the van parked and he was already pulling in. He had the mill setup and ready to go within 10-15 min of getting to the site. It was amazing to watch him in action as he set up the saw mill - extremely efficient. We parked the mini-van and the U-Haul trailer off behind the mill to make it readily available to load the boards onto. We could only hold about 1/4 of the boards in the trailer as the mini-van would not have handled all the weight.
Here we have the first log onto the mill. This was one of two logs that I had sitting next to my driveway since last spring when I cut down two trees in my yard. Hence the reason for the bark falling off. Despite its outer looks, the wood it produced was beautiful.
The first cut:
The first boards:
The mill in action on the 3rd log. You can begin to see the trail of sawdust collecting on the ground. By the time we got done that pile was about 30 inches high along the length of the mill.
As the morning wore on out came the umbrella. The sawdust is already starting to stack up on the left. The basic process of sawing the log depended somewhat on the size of the log. Once loaded on the mill and levelled so that the pith was approximately level front to back. the first cut was made to remove a slab containing the bark and a majority of the sapwood and generally any imperfections such as curvature, limb stumps etc. On larger diameters, often a second cut was made before turning the log to get the next adjacent face. The second cut was not discarded but rather any second cuts before the log was squared were set aside on the log lift. When the log was complete, these were brought back up on the mill set on edge and squared up removign any bark and sapwood. Yielding more boards. The initial slabs were discarded for later recycling into firewood.
It was interesting to watch the mechanics of flipping the log over to get to the next adjoining face. Here you can see the hydrolic arm with a mechanical hand starting to lift the log:
Ready to begin cutting the next face.
After 8 hrs, we had cut all 20 logs that I had as well as 8 logs from Steve. We had to cut some of Steve's logs due to large crooks in the trees and previous saw marks. When you have a severely twisted log it may be better to cut the log into two shorter sections in order to maximize the output vs. attempting to cut the longer log with a bend or crook in it. There is a tradeoff - longer effort to handle 2 logs vs. 1, but some of that is offset by the amount of work to deal with the crooked log as well as the higher yield. Its amazing how much wood gets lost when dealing with a crooked log. I got to see it first hand when doing one of the red oak logs.
We moved one load home on Saturday night and setup the first base for stacking the wood and unloaded the trailer and returned it to Charlottesville. We were exhausted - 8 am till10pm with only a short lunch and supper break. My frient James volunteered to bring the remainder of the wood on his flat bed trailer pulled by his 4x4. Where my van and U-Haul trailer we could only get 1/4 of the load, with his trailer we managed the rest of my wood and we brought Steve's wood as well since he hadn't really put much thought into where to stack it after it was milled. I didn't want to leave the cherry and walnut just sitting out and we had room in our stacks.
Here are the stacks with Johannes standing next to give perspective. The stack bases are 4"x6" x 12' pressure treated boards with 5 - 4"x4"x48" pressure treated boards going across between them. We laid plastic under the long runners. Then levelled everything off front to back and side to side. Then laid a sticker board on each cross piece and then the first layer. The tarps are temporary. I need to get some corrugated roofing material and make a small frame to act as a roof over each pile and hopefully run shade cloth around the pile to basically hide it and allow it to blend more into the evironment. This also will help in air circulation.
Steve wanted a nice walnut mantle cut from one of the boards and Jim Hart did a fantastic job of creatively cutting the log to give a remarkable mantle. Its difficult to see but one side is natural edged with semi-symetrical bulges at either end.
Well thats all for this post.
