- Hey everyone, my name is Matt. Welcome to my backyard. So, a very common question that I get has to do with log sizes, and kind of determining at what point a log isn't really worth being sawn into lumber. Now, the answer to that
question is it depends, and it's really gonna depend on what you're looking to do. If you're having some fun, you just want to cut up
some stuff just for fun, and maybe you want to cut something that has high sentimental value, or is a species that you don't
normally find at a store, then that bar is probably pretty low. But until you see how little lumber you can make from a small log, you don't really appreciate like (Matt laughs) the commitment of trying
to turn something small into usable material. Now, there is going to be another question of the stability of that wood, and we'll talk more about that later on. First off, I want to do a little demo of trying to get some lumber
out of some small logs. So, my buddy Donovan, he hooked me up with some small logs that I can use for this demonstration. I'll leave you a link to
his channel down below. This was, let's call it a sentimental tree from a family member, and they want to be able
to use it for something. So, this kind of worked out pretty well. I have some stuff that I normally would not even consider even messing with, and they can get some material from a tree that was a big part of their lives. So, I am gonna be attempting to make edge lumber out of this, and I think this first piece is gonna the one that just wants to be a slab, 'cause it is a little too goofy. Now, one of the side effects of this demonstration is it should also demonstrate why... curvy logs don't make good saw logs for traditional edge lumber. So, this first one here is a huge, a massive eight
inches in diameter. (Matt laughs) This is so tiny. So you can see there is a felling split in here so when it was felled, it split, just how it happens so as you can see with this one we have a bend down here then
it drops off this way and if you look at it from the top it's goin like this so, in theory if you really wanna make actually edged lumber, somethin like this you
would have to cut it right around here or move
this massive bend here and you would have a saw log, and then another saw log. That's just way too short for me to really mess with at this point. The other ones will cut
to be more saw log-ish, but at this point I think this one is gonna be in here like this, and we're gonna try and cut it as it sits. I'm gonna try and put this in the saw so I come in, parallel to that split, and hopefully I can remove a lot of it and salvage some of the material that's there still. Well I tell ya this much, little logs make for easy sawing at least. (metal scraping) So this is our waste piece, looks pretty cool at least. So I think for this what
I'll do is prep each log individually, and then
I can stack them all in the bed and cut all the boards out of em all at once at the end. Since this is gonna be slabs, this guy is ready to go. All the other ones will become boards. I will score up on three sides. (log clanking) So I'll set this guy aside for now, and we can take a look
at our next big log. (Matt laughs) Seven inches in diameter, this boy is a big boy. (Matt laughs) So as we look at this thing that's kinda layin there one the bed, we can see this not really gonna yield anything if we cut it as is, so we have to cut it up into some different lengths for our saw logs. So if we take a look at
the log in this plane, it's pretty straight and then it just kinda goes (splat sound) like that down at that end, so that needs to come off. And then if you look at it in this plane, you can see it's pretty flat through here, but then it goes "fwoop" up in the air, so this log is goin to require two cuts. We're gonna make one cut right here to remove this kinda weird jot thing, and then one cut over here to straighten out this end. So we'll have one basically four foot long saw log and then two of these little like, two footers. (mechanical sawing) So I'm gonna grab the
chainsaw make those cuts real quick and then start squaring up these huge logs into cants. (Matt laughs) (machine sawing) All right, there's our (metal tapping) first cant. (metal clanging) Like, three boards in there not bad. Set this guy aside and we'll cut those two short ones now. (machine sawing) I think my general rule of if something's big enough to be worth
it is if I can lift it it's probably too small to be worth it. (metal clanging) (Matt grunting) (wood clattering) If you can throw the cant, it's too small. (Matt laughs) (metal clanging) (machine sawing) So since this one has a curve in it, I'm just tryna eyeball getting it even so that
it gives us the most amount of yield. (Matt laughs) Which, this is not gonna give us much yield anyway. But I'm just gonna pick
up this end a little bit put a shim underneath it, which is a scrap piece of wood, and I can clamp it against
the side stops here. I'll make that... Edging cut. (machine sawing) All right. (metal clattering) Another cant ready to go. Let's see what's next. (metal banging) There, this looks like a good size. Oh, another goofy one, wonderful. All right so this one's
got a crotch section still attached down there, and as you can see after
the crotch it bends up and away, so on this one I come in here and cut right above the crotch section that'll give us this as a massive saw log. (Matt laughs) Six inches in diameter, and then we'll have a
little crotch section down here which is a
little bigger this is... This is eight, a huge eight inch splays to about ten inch crotch up here so one quick cut, and then back to squaring things up well, sort of squaring things up. Three sided square up. (machine sawing) Although with the things being so light, makes ya feel super powerful being able to throw em around like they're nothin. This is gonna be too short. (Matt laughs) My bunks are two feet apart so I can cut small stuff but this might be too small for this without a auxiliary bed. Yep, I'll be right back. (log thumps) (metal clanging) (machine sawing) When things are a little
precarious like that, you have to go pretty slow with the feed to keep the cut forces down a little bit, there you are. (Matt laughs) Thought the camera was over there. I guess, basically the cut forces have all this torque on the log so it ends up tryna roll it that way especially with this
blockade being so low here, so going slow, keeping that cut force down helps to keep this thing
from either vibrating or you know, completely rolling out of its cradle. (metal clanging) (machine sawing) I think what I'll do is give you a little look at the next three logs, and just show you how crazy they are, and I'll just cut em all up at once into their actual saw log lengths. So, this one of course
got this bend in here that's gonna be an easy one, just come up here and
chop this piece off here. That might be too short
to really mess with, but at least we'll have, (Matt laughs) that's like I don't know, 30 inches long. A little tiny log there
that's fairly straight, same kinda deal here we have up until this crotch, and this thing starts goin off sideways so this is gonna get clipped right there, but it also has another
bend that this kinda baby crotch right over here, so instead of trying to cut this all as one long length, that's gonna be one log and then another log there, which is gonna be super,
super bendy and goofy. So this last one here is gonna be pretty easy as well. It is bent, so I don't
know if that's really gonna yield an actual board out of there, that bend might be too great of a curve to actually get a
straight piece out of it, but we'll see otherwise I'll just trim it down there, cut it here at the crotch, and then we'll have this little tiny piece up in here. So I'm gonna grab the chainsaw, get these cut, and then start putting them on the saw. (metal clangs) All right let's bump the sketch factor up a little bit and cut more than one at once, normally this is not a big deal with the logs that I usually cut cause they're bigger and
they have a little more of that gravity to 'em, so they don't tend to move around on their own a whole lot, but these are a little squirmy so, it might be kind of a... A different story. (metal clanging) (machine sawing) (metal clanging) Okay... (metal clanging) Two more cants in the pile. (metal clanging) (Matt laughs) Oh man. I think these are all gonna be a little too goofy to do multiple, so it's back to one at a time. This is so ridiculous. (metal clanging) Look how small this thing is, forgot to get a measurement for you guys. Five and 1/2, it's a big boy. (Matt laughs) (machine sawing) In the pile. (metal clanging) Woosh... Nice! (machine sawing) In the pile. (log clattering) Ugh, is this too small? It's just gonna make it. (metal clanging) Okay this is gonna be the last little log we do out here on the saw mill, it's everything else is all too goofy and needed just too short to really clamp and position. I think that's probably the biggest issue with the small logged stuff is that, they're so small that it's just hard to hold onto them in
like a sawmill context. When you get down to this size, sawing stuff in the shop is probably the honestly the easier way to go. So I have a few logs left over so after we cut up everything out here, we can head into the shop
and I'll show you how to cut up these other small stuff on the indoor bandsaw, because
that's probably a little more practical for most people that are actually questioning whether or not they wanna saw logs this small. Probably don't have a sawmill, but you probably have
a bandsaw in your shop. Look at that baby thing, we're gonna get some,
like a four inch wide board out of there. It's gonna be nice. All right, so I'm gonna get all the cants that we cut that
are in the pile right now set up on the bed of the mill, and it's time to slice up our boards. So now with all these set up and ready to be cut, I can use
the lumber scale on here to actually make all these individual cuts so this is a 4/4 scale, so each number on here is a board that's an inch and 1/8 thick. I'm gonna do... Basically skinny 6/4, so I'm gonna go 1/2 markings on here. They won't be exactly 6/4, but since this is all consistent, it's not gonna matter a whole lot so I'll come down, make
a cut, remove the waste and then just make all
the cuts all the way down to the bed, and that will leave us
with a stack of boards, and we'll have some wood. (machine sawing) Let's see how I did with this one with the crack in it. Eh, got some of it out. (metal clanging) That one's got a... (Matt laughs) Pretty well, got the crack contained in that board, so that ones... (wood clattering) Yep. (metal clanging) Then we got one decent board out of there, so, or I guess slab or whatever. Since I had to use my little straddle board here, I've got a thin piece of that crotch. This is a 3/4 inch board, and then the rest are gonna be 6/4 so I got three full pieces out of that. This ones got a little bit of wane still, but there's one board. One good board I guess. This guy we've got three pretty solid lookin boards. Same thing back here,
three solid lookin boards these are six and 1/2 inches wide by 29 inches long so
I guess it's somethin. Put those in the pile I guess. (metal clang) Waste piece here, (wood clattering) two pieces from this guy. It's got a short section, which is usable so I guess we'll count that as a usable piece, otherwise we got two... (murmurs) I do with this? (metal clanging) I guess I cut this wrong, oh really. I must have only squared
two sides of this one I wasn't payin attention. So that ones got one live edge. (Matt laughs) Which is fine I guess. That's a piece of waste. That's a piece of waste. Two boards, those are
a little bit narrower. Four and 1/2 inches wide. Three sizable boards, what we got here? Six and change by... Woo, 44. (Matt laughs) That's a hard fought... What was that, three board feet? (Matt laughs) This ones got a good amount of wane still. Another, board kinda like those last ones. Now granted I still have this log to cut and this log, and I guess I can try and cut this, but we'll
do that in a second. And of everything that I've cut so far in the sawmill, here's our stack of actual finished pieces of wood. So we have a stack that's a a few feet wide, and two, the bunks are two feet apart so that's about two and 1/2 feet wide maybe three feet long
and about a foot tall. So not a really a whole lot, and I've been out here for... A bit over two hours already so as far as like, yield
for your time goes? Not a whole lot but you can get you know, some decently usable material out of some pretty small logs if you wanna spend the time doing it. So these look a little bit bigger in the shop although they still don't look huge by any means. So I'm gonna start off with this guy here, this is gonna become a decent section here to make actual boards out of, this guy is way too curvy, I might just try and cut some slabs as a demonstration out of that guy on the bandsaw. Before I get started, I do wanna chop off this thing so let's
head over to the bandsaw and do that. One thing you wanna be
careful of as you're coming across a log on
a bandsaw is the fact that the cut force is
pulling this thing down, creating a rotational effect, so if you are coming through here trying to cut off like a cookie or in this case this limb, you have to be very careful to stay in control of the cut because it could roll into the blade, catch, and then well hopefully your saw is underpowered and jams it up, otherwise it is going to throw something at you or pull you into the saw. Now the process in here is going to be very similar to
the process out there. We need to first set this thing up to be kinda squared off, especially since we're
gonna be hand-feeding this thing through the saw, we don't want this thing rolling around on us, so to make that first cut, to make a nice flat face, we need some way to stabilize this thing. So what I've used in the past is a tall auxiliary fence just screwed that to the log and push that
through as one unit, then I'll make the outside
face nice and flat. I threw that thing away a long time ago because I never used it, so here's another way to do that. This is just a block of wood it's gonna be a carrier, it essentially just stabilizes it so that
it can't rock around. So with this, couple of screws in here and then we can head over to the bandsaw and make that nice long facing cut to establish one flat face. (machine sawing) (drill whirring) Kay, now I can flip the newly cut flat-side down, and find a good way to get some screws in here again. (machine sawing) (drill whirring) Okay so now we're with two square sides it just becomes a matter of a simple re-sawing type job so like this we can go back to the bandsaw, set the fence to whatever
thickness board we want, and then go ahead and make all the cuts to produce all the boards. And the last thing on the list, once all those boards are cut is going to be the edge of them, so you can adjust the fence width to get whatever yield you
want out of that board. Kay so two boards out of that log, that's not too bad. I think I'm just gonna leave this one because it's a little bit goofy to cut, but if you want to use this method for cutting slabs, all you would need is this little, what we were callin this little guide board thing, or some kind of auxiliary
fence or something that you can screw this thing to, and then just slice
all your boards out of. Ideally you would want
this thing to be longer than the length of the thing you're trying to cut so
you have a little bit of in feed and out feed support as you're going through there, but the process will be just the same as that first cut just repeated. Make that first cut with the fence, and keep going just make sure you don't hit your screws as you're getting closer to the end of the cut. So, this little auxiliary board thing is one way to do this, I personally favor a
more quick and dirty way of squaring up these logs if I wanna saw them in the shop, and that's because I have a jointer. Jointers a great way to quickly square up things, including logs. (Matt laughs) Now I know some of you seeing this are probably gonna be like, "Oh no, are you gonna, you know, "dull your knives or whatever?" So if you de-bark your
logs and you clean them that shouldn't be a huge deal, but remember you are
cutting these things with your bandsaw so if you're not already cleaning your logs, you're
just gonna be dulling you bandsaw not your jointer knife, so it just kinda depends on where you really care about things. I've got carbide knives on the jointer, and I don't really care a whole lot. Tools are made to be used, and dulling them is
just part of the process of actually using your tools to get things done. (Matt laughs) So I have this little
tiny thing that I cut off of that first log, and
then I think I'm gonna grab that little tiny
stick thing out in the yard just to show you how
little lumber you can get out of something that's like three inches in diameter. So there we go, I got a couple a boards out of that little tiny log. These are one inch thick about three and 1/4 wide and maybe like three feet long, something like that, so there's still material in that tiny little log although, not a whole lot, but in the grand scheme of things this was pretty quick
to get these two boards out of this log. In the shop, this would be a lot harder to do on the bandsaw mill cause it's so small and like hard to hold. So lastly lets talk a
little bit about stability, and what to expect there. So, first off you're gonna see a lot more inherent cupping with
board from smaller trees that just happens to
be part of the process because the growth rings are gonna be much more exaggerated, so you're gonna have a much greater curvature to them, you're gonna see a lot more cupping. So this is a piece of mulberry that I cut ooh like, eight years ago. It's from a small tree, it's still perfectly usable, but you're gonna see a
lot more inherent cupping of a board out of a small diameter tree or small diameter log, and secondly as things
pertain to stability, it is a fact that if
you're cutting small logs there's a very low
likely hood that that log came from the main section of a tree. If you're cutting small stuff it was probably part of the branch or upper canopy of the tree, which inherently has a
lot more stress in it as you can see from
this branch for example, there is a lot of,
can't relieve the stress on this wood and if this was sawn into lumber, it is very
likely that it will distort greatly once drying, and it will continue
to distort as being cut and made into things so
just keep that in mind. If you keep a realistic expectation of what you're gonna have
for cutting limb wood then its all right, but if you expect that you're gonna have boards that are
gonna stay perfectly flat and be these big panels that you can do for large pieces of furniture, you're not. (Matt laughs) But if you're gonna make you know, smaller things, you
wanna cut these things up into cutting board
blanks, things like that, it's not gonna be a big of an issue but if you're trying to make furniture out of limb wood, its just
not gonna go well for ya. So that brings us back
to our pile of wood here. If you haven't put it together yet, a lot of this tree or a lot of these logs that I cut
are actually limb wood. The only kind of straight
grain or straight piece is gonna be this guy down here that had the split, that was the main trunk of the tree. The rest is all weird limbs and things, so I expect a lot of the stuff to distort as it's drying, but
it's a sentimental wood so it's all good in the hood. (Matt laughs) So one little reminder, if you do try this bandsaw your own wood in the shop outta logs thing, make sure you clean off the sawdust and you don't leave these blocks of wood sitting
on your bandsaw table, this stuff is loaded with moisture. If you leave it there, and you come back the
next day you'll probably have a rusty bandsaw table to have to deal with so. You know I did that before right? (Matt laughs) So that is gonna do it for this one, hopefully a visual representation helped to answer your questions on is cutting a tiny
little log really worth it, are you really gonna get the yield that you want out of it, and only you can decide, I can just show you what to expect. So thank you as always for watching, I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on cutting tiny little logs, anything about the sawmill, or anything back in the shop, please feel free to leave me a comment as I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have, and till next time. (Matt laughs) Happy wood working.
