How to Quarter Saw Lumber, The Old Way? Or the New Way?

this video is about quarter sewing lumber the old way it's very inefficient and the new way that's more adapted to modern sawmills stay with me as we go through the different ways of quarter sewing lumber but we need to talk about the efficiency of operating sawmill and what we're going to talk about is the traditional way of quarter saw and lumber then i'm going to introduce you to a better way that is much more efficient on a modern bandsaw mill to cut cortisone lumber why do we need to do this well much of the 18th century when cortisone lumber this old traditional way come about is most of the people that worked at sawmills were making about two dollars a day that wage didn't nearly change for nearly 100 years in 1930 though they started making two dollars an hour and now our president wants to pay everybody a minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour all of this means that for us to stay in business as sawmill operators we must either raise the price for lumber or come much more efficient as operators of the sawmills so what i'm going to show you first is the old traditional way of quarter sawing lumber and then i'm going to show you a modern way to cut it with a modern bandsaw mill that will save you a lot of labor i think this should help you out in becoming more efficient as a sawmill operator i first tried to demonstrate this with these smaller logs what i'm going to show you is different ways to quarter saw a log we're going to do it inside here just because i can take these in logs and move along much faster than i can on the sawmill but it'd be the same principle when you're at your sawmill i tried to demonstrate this 15 inch log and soon realized something is that's too small a log to try to quarter saw when you start quarter sawing all you get is just a little bit of wood out of the thing on a small log so brings up the fact again about production and how fast you know to control your cost you need to be as efficient as possible and what that means is you need to produce so many board feet an hour of if you're doing quarters or in quarter cell lumber when you're using a small log you're doing a lot of work the same work you really would do on this big piece of wood but you're getting very little results because the wood pieces are just so small that you're getting out of it after all that work now if you have a small sawmill and no ability to move logs around you're kind of stuck with doing small logs but if you have the equipment and a sawmill sufficient size to do it you need to use this one the biggest log you've got available for quarter sawing second is as you can see by this big oak log here the log is not exactly round therefore if you can choose a log that's round as possible and you'll get more production out of it i'm still going to use this to illustrate what we're doing but i think you'll get the idea typical quarter sawing that is old school that teaches you to cortisol is to cut the log in four quarters that's where it gets its name in this case we have a problem with the log in the middle so normally i would try to look around and find out where i could get the most cortisol and lumber out of the log like that's a really good place maybe here but here we've got an issue that if we do we're going to end up with a crack on the board so why don't we just cut it down the crack one we always want to key off the pith here so uh typical quarter sawing you would lay the log up and cut it in half right across the pith then you would go 90 degrees to that and cut it again across the pith so that uh you end up with four quarters if we do that and the reason you do that is you're trying to figure out where the quarters on lumber cortisone lumber is always cut where it comes the grain but you want the grain going crossways on it like this is in other words if i illustrate this grain flow and follow some of these uh growth rings we would see that this log that's the growth rings on it and if we go over here and this is where you round log makes more sense other than you can get more quarter zone out of this log because of that dip but i'm following the grain with the pen and then you come over here and you've got a little bit of wavy grain but it's basically good and over here you've got the same thing this seam may seem a little tedious but there's a point to it okay uh typically quarter sewn lumber is just taking it where the grain is crossways in other words here here we're we're getting less than 45 degrees so anything past that is not cornerstone anything on this side of that line would probably be classified as quarter sum now if i get over here i could probably use that so we always want to eliminate that pith because it's going to cause problems with your log so that's your good usable lumber some people before they quarter saw the log will go through and trim the log square it up get rid of the white wood and that just you're going to have to get rid of it at some point either to start with or at the last you you choose but that's just way some people do if we quarter saw this log let me take a second to do that and then we're going to play a little with those quarters now that's what same way you would do with your sawmill when the log is laying up keep in mind what i'm talking about is cutting this right across there like i just did and then we're going to roll the log and cut it again with our sawmill i'm just doing it on the saw but i want to keep the orientation where you can understand what we're doing so one of the problems is the distance between that cut and the top of your log in this case here some of the sawmills will only do about nine inch clearance between the blade and the top of their blade guards so you couldn't use this kind big a log for that which goes back again why it's kind of good to square it up first get rid of that wood that'll allow you to get more so you may have to use slightly smaller log depending on your sawmill but this is probably pretty excessive for most sawmills right there but we got the log sawed in half so our next step on regular sawmill doing it the old-fashioned way would be to saw the halves into quarters now for efficiency let me give you a little shop trick you can either take the halves and try to stand them up which is kind of an issue but that's the way it's normally done or on each end of the log put your big cargo strap around these things to hold them together and roll them all at one time take the cargo strap off one end come down halfway along the log put it back on take the other end off and you can cut both of them at one time yet they're standing up easy that's just a shop trick you don't have to do it that way that's just one of the ways so let's quarter saw these pieces uh so now we need to set these aside and quarter saw our other piece [Music] so oh the old-fashioned way of quarter sawing was to now take this thing and stand it up on your sawmill if you're using a blade meal you would take a cut down here if you're using a bandsaw mill you always cut from the bottom up to get your squared up wood and to illustrate that a little better if we're bandsaw milling we're trying to get quarter-sawn lumber in other words lumber that's crying so the bandsaw mill we would take a board off like this and then all that wood in here would be quarter saw the next cut on a bandsaw mill you would roll the log and then take a cut off of it here and this would be your quarter-sawn lumber and then you would roll the log back if you're using a bandsaw mill doing it the old way and you would cut another board here and here's our quarter-sawn lumber and then we would roll this log and do it again do y'all see where we're going here we are spending a huge amount of time rolling this log to reconfigure each cut but that's old school way of quarter sawing some people have come up with better ways and and i've come up with one i think is even more efficient so i'm going to illustrate some of them so if you have a uh blade mill basically you would do the same operation only your blade would be running vertical i'm sorry you would make that cut first with a old blade mill cut that then roll it and cut it roll it and cut it the same you would have to do on a bandsaw so with all of that rolling and cutting you end up with uh supposedly carry this on out here we're going to roll it and cut it roll it and cut it roll it and cut it roll it and cut it roll it and cut it and usually you'd throw that away on the thing so that's waste wood but that's traditional quarter sewing of lumber and uh it gets some boards but what you'll notice is get a different color pen here we're not truly quarter sowing here's here's our grain let me draw the grain it'll be easier and what you see is that's not really a very good quarter song right here and that is down here but that's hard to see that grain there we got good quarter saw in the first couple of cuts and then it starts leaning over and our grain is kind of running an angle so supposedly the definition of quarter sawn is anything less than 45 degrees a quarter sum but it's a poor quality quarter song this is your better quality where it goes straight across so a lot of flipping and turning a lot of flipping and turning waste wood you're going to have waste wood with quarter sawn any way you go at it so another way to because you're flipping and turning flipping and turning one of the other things you might want to consider using the old way of cutting is using the older way of cutting one of the things to increase efficiency you can do here and that is cut this one all the way across put them together flip them both put them back together you have to take this into the other side and cut the second cut but by laying two logs if your sawmill will handle it on there you get more efficient cuts with all this flip and turning now the problem is you're flipping two logs every time not just one so that's a debatable process on the thing so anyway if you want to try that method do it notice that this that's the old traditional way of doing it i think they thought labor was cheaper back when that was invented and we know that all this turning and turning take eats up a lot of hourly labor cost doing that and reposition that log so we got to come up with a way to spend less labor less time producing this cortisone lumber so let's look at some other ways of doing it because this is a little better than three inches thick post oak we're working with it is heavy okay here's an alternative for you if we know that the pith of a log is always a problem for our lumber so we're going to key still with quarter sawn you're going to key everything off event so if i was going to truly quarter saw i would lay this like that and quarter saw it but what if you do this what if you go around here and mark your wood i'm going to just so that we can keep up with this doing the growth rings [Applause] all right there's our growth ring and we know we want to go perpendicular to them in our cuts to get quarter-sawn lumber why don't we do this why don't you lay one we got a i'm going to key off this crack just to get rid of it but what if i go out here on the end of my ruler and look to where the growth rings start to fall off start to fall off below 45 degrees and i'm looking in and about right there if i go to this other end and start looking it's a very similar style so if that's where we quit getting good quarter-sawn lumber out of our log why don't we just cut it there because we only want quarter saw and lumber but let's go over here on the other side and play the same game i want to look to where it falls off and this side it's much greater man i can i can come up that far on that side let's see what the other does uh yeah this this thing now i want these two lines parallel more or less so but see all of that stuff in that area is quarter song so that's good now that's not the only quarter-sawn lumber we have in our log we have quarter-sawn lumber here so if i go using the pith as a guide and i want to go quarter sawn off of that i start looking over here to where we start losing our quarter song because that's flat actually it's about right there on that side and well we're going to lose a little on this side so what we need to do is if i'm just going to cut that there green lines are what we're going to cut with our uh sawmill or blade mill okay here we're gonna look to where it falls off and boy it goes way over here on this side are we gonna be that lucky on the other side no it falls off about right there so i can do two things one i can try to average those two lines but since they're going to be cut loose anyway we don't necessarily have to i can take in draw me a cut line there and i can draw me a cut line over here and they're not matched up but that doesn't matter let me show you why we're kind of playing a trick here if i take this log now and one thing we got to remember about this log is you want to look in here in the middle and you want to see different logs have different um pith widths and this one i'm looking and it looks like it's about right there why that's important if we take this piece and mark a line right there and right there and if we cut the pith out we still got a quarter sum now one thing we're going to need to do up here is we're going to need to get rid of our bark white wood so we're going to end up doing a cut there we're going to end up doing a cut here just get rid of white wood okay all this layout may not make a lot of sense but but think of this if we take our log if we take our log and we got the pith and the and this green line is coming off the top of the pith this green line is coming under the pith what we do is we capture the pith in one piece and then this and this is what's below that cut but they're still salvageable wood but this way also we're getting rid of all that countless flip flip flip flip that we're doing with traditional quarter sawing i want you to see how quick simple this is to get you some good quarter-sawn lumber out of using this method uh all right [Music] we're gonna sit this one aside and in a minute we'll cut it off [Music] all right let's get our quarter-sawn lumber out of here [Music] so all right again this is the off cut and we'll get some quarter sawn out of that in a minute now one we want to get rid of our old bark so this cut gets rid of our bark keep in mind we we just reorientated this this is going to be standing up like this on our sawmill and we're running our sawmill down a whole log we're going to run the sawmill down a whole lot cut here here and here you might want to flip it at this point so that you can get a better cut here if it won't hold but for right now we're good all right [Applause] there's our good quarter song that doorway it's just a pith and i can either flip this or try to cut it bounce it on that edge but what i'm doing is getting rid of white foot got rid of our white wood at this point we have two quarter sawn pieces we get an orientation here that sides match to the pith but the pith's gone so what i would do at this point if you wanted to one your quarter-sawn lumber remember you want it running you want it running vertical ah we got it right here toward the pith so what you would probably do is lay the pith to one side and you can start cutting anywhere and let's say we're cutting one vice we would just start cutting and every one of them the piece that we cut off that would have quarter sewn with the grain wood you see we're not not we've got rid of all this flipping around this okay make it more efficient do them at the same time get two of them on there you remember you don't have to flip them you got them clamped then you just cut cut cut cut and you're through and all of its quarter sawn that's out of these center sections of your log so that's simple enough we would just take if we put them together i don't think i can hold them so i'm just going to illustrate one so i would on the sawmill i would pass it down and you can see our flick raise but here you can definitely see the quarter song part of the board once that goes aside a second we're going to save that other quarter-sawn lumber i don't think so i'm gonna put it here set this aside for a moment get this one and here's our quarter song lumber now as we've done that we still want to cut our white wood off of this get rid of our trash wood that isn't quarter-sawn lumber that's just trash and we've got our grain he's going across on the thing i would want that to be a crossways on my piece so i'd want to cut down this way so that i'm bisecting those lines so you would cut it this way and quarter saw that off and if you look at those marine growth ring lines it is so we would want to cut down lay it on its edge and our bandsaw mill we would cut through this way perpendicular to those lines and we would get quarter-sawn lumber out of it we done this uh now two of our side pieces are uh cut now but we want to get rid of our white wood on the edge [Music] now except like this and just run our sawmill down to we're through and air all of our lumber will be quarter sawn and these are the two side pieces not the central pieces that we start to stir it off with so out of this log here's our two side pieces and we've got our fifth our uh quarter song pieces out of it so we've got that much sorry that goes like that excuse me i'm working up swept handling this big log so that's the quarter-sawn lumber we have gotten out of this base 29 inch round log but that's a pretty significant amount and remember when you shrink it down just imagine that you're only getting this much if i make this a 15 inch log and you see the issue real quick why big logs make more quarter sawn bigger log more efficiency or cutting this thing but we've been real efficient because how many cuts have we made we made just to get to the quarter sawn we only made this cut and this one and then we took these two which could be cut at the same time but since they're different widths we'll probably cut them separate so that's two three four five six cuts seven eight as we took the pith out in eight cuts we've got these logs that say you're using a ten foot log this thing is ten foot of really nice quarter-sawn lumber it's and so you're going to start cutting it of course roll it cut it off and you'll have quarter sawn lumber for 10 feet so that's one aspect of it now think of this these are the corners that i cut off of here actually you do have some quarter sawn lumber in those if you want to take advantage of it but you've got a problem one here's our growth rings so quarter-sawn lumber would be basically that lumber right there but you have to do that you'd have to cut this off and cut that off and then cut this off and yes you would end up with a little quarter sawn lumber again we're dealing with a 29 inch log if i deal with a 15 inch log it's that big by that big ain't worth the prop trouble if you're doing big logs it might be worth your time to set this up somehow and cut this off and flip it and cut that off and then some other jig to hold it in this position and cut that and then you could flip it and cut that piece and you would have some more quarter sawn lumber that's a lot of flipping and turning and it'd be up to you where you want to go to that trouble a lot of people just throw these pieces away there remember there's four of them that come off each corner so you can try to do that if you want to but it's not really worth the trouble on small logs i was trying to make the point about how much less efficient small logs were for quarter sawing and i thought this example might be useful this was cut out of a 29 inch log and you see this piece we got here this was cut out of a 15 inch log so 15 inch log 29 inch log that's how much quarter sawn you get out of the thing you see how the efficiency increases a lot by going to bigger logs so save your small logs for lumber use your bigger logs for quarter sewing if that's what you're trying to do because the production is there on the big logs but not on the lilitz 15 inch log ain't gonna cut it so i hope that gives you a lesson on how to do quarter sawn lower you'd be a lot neater on your sawmill than me trying to hand do it in here but it's still it's the same principle i'm just can do it faster in here for this purpose this video so here's some great post oak lumber that is quarter-song would make really good table tops remember one of the big advantage table tops it doesn't what i mean a quarter-sawn is it doesn't warp when you're gluing all this together for a big wide tabletop you do not want those joints warp it so that's where you usually use quarter-sawn lumber something that's you want very stable so hopefully this was helpful we'll see on the next video if you like this video please hit the like button down at the bottom let us let us know what you think of our demonstration here and all the trouble we went to to explain this also subscribe so that you'll get notifications about the uh upcoming videos we got a whole bunch more of them coming where we're trying to explain some of this stuff hopefully it's useful be sure and give me comments down there if you've got any helpful information this uh video and other ones sometime are controversial because there's more than one way to do a lot of woodworking projects so give me your view on it till next time see you later you

Channel: George Wood of Texas

Views: 301,322

Keywords: Tree, How to saw, How to ..., wood, tools, boards of wood, chainsaw, oak tree, pine tree, Plank - wood, How to saw up a log, Amazing sawmill methods, how to make great boards, wood cutting, woodworking, How to create lumber to sell, woodwork, oak wood, saw mill, saws, hard wood, wood grain, sawmill near me

Id: oTnPxiGKRBM

Length: 37min 25sec (2245 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021