Lessons in Milling Logs

Everybody learns differently: some people research and research before they try things, others of us like to try things first to figure out what we don’t know, then go do a little more research about what went wrong ;0) It’s easier for me to remember why you do things a certain way when you’ve experienced the results of trying it differently.

Over the weekend I finished milling up a huge spruce tree into beams for the shop floor. Everything was running smoothly, I had enough gas to keep going and the weather was beautiful…what to do next?

Compared to the last batch of beams, these ones were relatively straight. I realize now that I should have changed the blade as soon as I had the bark off this massive log….but I hadn’t learned that lesson quite yet.

Earlier in the week I spent an afternoon attempting to sharpen the chainsaw blade and then cut all of my remaining spruce logs into short enough lengths for my sawmill. I really want to finish the shop floor and get it organized again. A very logical choice would have been to get the tractor and go grab one of the now shortened spruce logs….or I have all of these Oak logs sitting around waiting to be turned into useful lumber. Plus there is a huge stack of stickers taking up space in the shop that I cut just for these logs, so really milling these logs would help with the shop organization problem….it’s so easy to justify what you really want to be doing :0)

One of the logs looked small enough to handle with our little tractor, so I chained it up and slowly crept over to the mill with it. Wes assisted in holding the log straight as I lowered it and once it was unchained we were ready to go!

Sometimes I really am a slow learner, I should have known when it was taking minutes to push the mill through the log that something was wrong. Instead I started thinking things like “Man! It’s going to take forever to mill these oak logs!” Is yeah, it is if you never change your blade, but it did not dawn on me that that was the problem yet.

I had to step away from the mill for an hour or so, hungry kids and whatnot. When I came back to it I realized that what I thought was just the tannins reacting to the water were actually burn marks. And when you looked down the side of the log, it was wavy, really wavy.

The family needed dinner so I left it for the night, came out the next morning and put on a new blade. It was like milling with a completely different machine ;0). I’m sure my tolerances aren’t as tight as some other mills, but compared to the results of the last attempt these were pretty near perfect!

Burr oak like these that are growing in fields or on sand dunes aren’t nearly as straight in their grain as a white oak growing in a forest. The grain on some of these cuts is really tight and I noticed some rather pretty ray flecks as I was stacking the lumber.

Here’s to hoping that I did at least a couple of things right and end up with some usable furniture wood!

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