November 2, 2007
Wood
Gary has been busy pulling logs out of the woods and cutting them on the sawmill.
These boards are from locust trees. We have a large stand of locust. They grow quickly and we use them in many ways: firewood, fence posts and lumber for building. The color of the wood is a little yellower than most trees.
The near-daily hard frost collects on the bark of the slab wood. We will cut these slabs and use them for firewood. Locust is a hard wood and makes a nice warm fire!
Murphy and Big Tom wait patiently for the camera to be pointed at them. They are always ready to have their picture taken.
Posted by roosterh at 10:42 PM
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June 19, 2005
No Free Lunches
We couldn't believe our luck. Someone on our local freecycle list was offering a stack of logs for free. They were big pine logs.
We were a little cramped setting up, and the logs were so big and downhill that they were very hard to move by hand. We had no tractor or anything to help us.
We had such big plans for this wood. We were going to redo our hay wagons which sorely need new wood sides. These logs were wide enough and long enough to do it.
We turned the log to create a cant and get going on sawing this up.
But luck was not with us today. This is one of the bolts we found in t log. Once you hit hardware like this, the teeth on the sawblade bend and render it useless. We went through 3 blades on this log alone. At $30 each, it was turning into an expensive day. We thanked the owners and went back down the road with just a few pieces of wood to show for our day.
Posted by roosterh at 5:47 AM
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August 29, 2004
Another wood job
Here is a log ready to cut and the tool we use to move it (peavy or cant hook). I think this log was 14.5' long.
Cutting the log into lumber is part art, part math and geometry and part luck. You never know what a log will do or even what is inside a log. We have found fence parts, shotgun slugs and nails. Sometimes a log is rotten. This picture shows Gary measuring the cant, or the squared off log, to determine the next cut. We are making 2x8's out of this one if I remember right. Once the log is squared off, you are ready to make the lumber.
Here is Gary cutting the cant into lumber. Even if you are making 2x8's, your log has to be larger than 8x8 to make 4 boards. Each cut you make on the log also takes up a part of the wood just from the width of the blade. This is called the kerf. Typically the blade will take 1/4" with each cut, so you would really have to have a cant of 9x8.25 to make 4 2x8's.
I keep track of all the board feet we cut, and help remove the lumber from the mill, stack it, throw the slab wood (or what you remove to make the cant or squared off log). Slab wood is shown in the back of the truck in pic #2.
Yesterday we had about 2 more cuts to be done when we had a torrential downpour. So I could not take more pix of the stack we did. We cleaned up in the rain, after having cut in 85 degree temps. There's nothing more miserable than being covered in sawdust and dirt and then being rained on. Wet sawdust is very sticky.
Posted by roosterh at 12:04 PM
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November 2, 2003
Cutting wood in the snow and rain
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We had a sawmill job at a local farm today.
This log pictured ended up being too wide at the end for the mill to pass by! If it weren't for the rain I would have taken pictures of its extraction. We had to push the head of the mill back a foot, and then use a chain saw to wack off part of the log.
Managed to cut a lot of wood despite the weather. We still have 5 more logs to go, so we will go back there later and trade them for hay.
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This farmer owns hundreds of acres high in the hills. Here is a view, not far from where we cut. You can see the town of Candor nestled in the fog.
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Posted by roosterh at 2:54 PM
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