How to Quarter Saw the Easy Way

everybody welcome back to the iron oak sawmills this is your first time here welcome my name's chuck and i'm deb and we are iron and oak sawmill to the folks that come out every week definitely appreciate all your support and guess what guys 27 000 subscribers we just passed the mark about a day or so ago excellent thank you guys very much for all your support if you're new here hey consider driving that number a little higher hit that subscribe button of course everybody hit the like button and share it with friend okay today's video we are going to be quarter sawing a red oak log this is a long awaited video for a lot of folks been bugging me can you do a quarter song video can you do a quarter song video finally yes we're going to do a quarter song video this is what we would consider one of the easiest forms of quarter sawing you can do [Music] quarter sawing is notorious for a lot of waste and a lot of time but although this method does take more time and does produce a little bit more waste you do pull more boards out of it than normal and you pull some good quality boards out of it as well as long as you got a quality log that's the biggest thing a couple things to point out and you'll probably hear them later on in the video i'll mention them again quarter sawing a log that's 12 inches not really worth it i think the minimum for quarter sawing is a nice clear straight 18 inch and thicker or 18 inch and larger diameter log it's just below that it's not really that good also um you want it that the pith is that it's a fairly even grown tree the pith is very close to the center because with the method we're using you're going to see why okay but i learned this method a while ago back probably when i first started looking into buying a sawmill i think it was a video from a timbergreen farms and you'll probably hear me mention that again later in this video as well timbergreen farms taught me this method by watching your video and i'm going to share that with you guys and i think you'll enjoy it so let's go ahead and get started we've got a nice red oak log ready for the mill let's get milling okay what we got here guys is this beautiful straight no taper red oak log clear one into the other eight foot long 24 inch diameter and uh yeah you couldn't ask for a better log when it comes to cortisone guys you want to use your clear logs because you don't want knots in the middle of your quarter saw in also pretty much any log under 16 18 inches not worth quarter sewing this is a nice even growth unfortunately we do have some stress cracks running on the log but we can use those to our advantage in fact the other end let me show you what that looks like it's basically quartered already thing is we are not going to quarter this okay i'll take you through step by step as we do this okay we're able to pick these logs up locally some folks that had purchased some slabs from us gave us a call said hey i've got uh some oak trees we cleared out around or where we're going to be putting up a pole barn and uh let's see if you can make use of them absolutely we can this is one of them here we've got another one over here and there were a few more that came off that site that are over in the log yard right now so this is our subject for today it's beautiful red oak log and if you like quarter sawing and you wanted to know how to do it and you want to do it the easier way this is it okay one of the most important things you can do with quarter sawing is to level the pith okay you've got to level the pith on a quarter-sawn log that way you maintain the quarter-sawn grain all the way down the log or all the way down the board if you do not the quarter-sawn is going to start to go away or become less than what it is from one end of the log to the other or one end of the board to the other so we're about 12 and a half there and 12 and a half here i don't even need to use the roller toe boards guys um it works out really nice okay we have the pith leveled luckily we do not have to do anything with it with the lt-35 you can use your roller toe boards in this case since the log is uh just under eight foot i think you have to be about eight and a half to definitely use the roller toe boards on either end for the lt-35 so if we did need to level this we would have to go old school put our can hook under here or use the clamp lift up shim it a little bit on this end or that end whatever you got to do to get that pith centered or leveled and uh that is key to doing this guys basically what we're gonna do is start off taking a skim cut off of here just to give us enough to to set the log down on to keep it steady and do the same off of this side okay you do not want to cut way into here because when you start turning this to cut the boards out of here you want to keep your growth rings 90 degrees to the face of the board or perpendicular to the face of the board however you want to look at them so you have your board coming off this way your growth rings are this way okay i'm going to do is do that the four sides of the log we're going to flatten four sides of the logs give us four spots to locate off of no matter how we turn this log and uh we'll follow it up by splitting the log right down the middle okay we'll then take the log turn it 90 degrees from that split and uh yeah turn it 90 degrees from that split come down to the center go up a few boards off the center until you're still within the 90 degrees and make our first cut and then what we'll do is pull probably in this long four to six nice quarter-sawn boards out of the center of that log okay so [Music] [Music] [Music] okay now that we opened up the first two faces 180 degrees from each other we turn it 90 degrees to pick up the third side or the third face once again we'll level the pith making sure the pith is the same distance off the bed rails on each end we'll square it up you'll see deb take the square from me shortly she'll place it on the mill bed and up against the log to make sure it's uh that the cut is square to the mill bed don't trust your stops guys stops can move and uh you'll think you're square and you won't be okay once we have this squared up we'll go ahead and open our third and fourth face and we'll go from there [Music] [Applause] okay as you can see right now guys man this sun's a low in the sky right now as you can see we've got it lined up to go right down the middle now because we leveled the pith when we come out the other end that blade should be right there in the center of that log right at the pith okay we're gonna go ahead and cut this in half turn it up on end keeping it together and we'll make our next step from there [Music] okay you saw slice it down the middle we turned it up on end i brought the blade down to the pith and then measured up three four quarter boards because that's what we're slicing the set four quarters and uh we should be able to slice one two three to the pith and one two three on the other side and then we'll have to make adjustments after that so we'll do is cut this the top two will go off we'll process those out in another way and then we'll get our six cuts or six boards one on each side three cuts you see one two three four five six so it'll be 12 boards quarter sawn and then we could process a little bit more out of these two halves and the other two halves and we'll go from there chicken [Applause] so check it out definite reflect here so we've got a board outside of that knot about five inches so i mean there's even more down here you don't want to just arbitrarily trim all this off because there are still some good pieces in here and his ray fleck's only going to get better guys now let's get in where it's a little bit better a little bit more ray fleck and uh go from there man yeah the ray's a little bit better in this half and again this is closer to the outside of the log as you can see the sapwood here that's where you're picking up your best quarter song i don't know if some water would help bring that up or not i don't know if we toss some water but you can see definite these are the medullary rays or reflec or tiger oak some people call this tiger oak but it's officially known as quarter-sawn lumber and you can quarter-saw any log and quarter-sawn lumber is supposed to be the most stable um because of the way the grain runs if you look at the end here you can see quarter song when the growth range are 90 degrees to the face as you can get closer to the center like i said towards the juvenile wood race or the they start to bend a little bit there they're just they're just out of 90 degrees this piece right here outside here probably six inch board all the way down quarter sawn beautiful stuff look at that reflect guys do we have any water i gotta splash one of these i'm gonna splash some of the better ones i think are you seeing that but what happens with this is it almost it takes on almost a three-dimensional look when it's sanded and finished [Music] you can actually feel the ripples there from the quarter song or from the reflect i'm going to try to keep this to a minimum guys all right well that wasn't exactly minimum i think that popped the grain a little bit more let me get up here where i can see better there we go check out the reflect guys and lots of it in these boards trimming off the inside got yourself an eight inch wide quarter sawn red oak board beautiful stuff like i said this is the easiest way so far that i've learned a quarter saw i picked this up a couple years ago watching oh god i can't remember i think it was a video by timber green farms i don't know if it's still on youtube or not and so long ago they were quarter sawing i think they were quarter sawing oak white oak or red oak i can't remember and uh they used this method and they also quarter saw the cherry log as well i believe in that same video but i'm not going to take credit for this method that's where i learned it he may have learned it from someone else or somewhere else but uh timbergreen farms he might still be on i'm not 100 sure well it's going to wrap this one up for today um running out of daylight we're going to continue on with how we're going to process these two and the ones that the two that came off the top uh to try to pull a few more quarter sawn boards out but i think we've probably got you see that's a six inch six and a half inch here one two three four probably eight more boards of quarter-sawn lumber out of these probably do is lay them down on the deck cut them from the bottom up let's see how that goes tomorrow all right wrapping up the last of the quarter sawing bit here these are the two that were on the bottom that was what was left and we were running out of the 90 degree face so we turn them up here we're back on 90 degree face i'll probably be able to cut two slices out of this and then that'll be it i think we're gonna be done after that there's uh i maybe if i can find a way to get it turned slightly this way and slice down through it but i don't know yeah one or two cuts and that'll be it yeah but you can see there's a nice ray fleck up here sun's catching that it's on both of them but this one really sticks out a lot and then we'll have the same reflect on those as well what we did when we brought these up because they do react when you cut when you split that can you split that log in half and then you cut these big pieces off they do react they do flex so i went all four sides flat flattened them out again because they were all they were curved in one way or another now they're flat now they're squared up and they should cut nice so let's go ahead i'm gonna get two passes here and then i'm pretty much to be done with this can with these cans [Music] [Music] [Applause] there you go i that's some nice cortisone right there all right still got some nice quarter-sawn grain on that going up into this that's about it i'm just taking a shot at getting a board out of here okay we've decided to get a little more elaborate with these last four pieces um what we're working on is getting the growth rings 90 degrees to the saw blade it's a little tough to do because the piece is essentially a triangle so you lay it up there get the growth rings 90 degrees to the saw blade create four flat sides again and it's all boards out of that and they're going to be some really nice quarter saw on boards stay tuned and check them out right there small [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys you can see what what kind of work that takes and you can see why cortisone lumber is so expensive but when it comes to quarter saw and oak this is why just pulling these two boards out here these are about five inches wide it's a beautiful quarter sawn grain got the medullary rays heavy in these cuts here probably two of the best boards we've seen off of this but with the hydraulic clamp it gives you a break to get uh to get these things clamped in place now i could show you the rest of these there's i'll process the the other three out exactly the same way [Music] and pull those kind of pull the rest of the cortisol out that we can and uh that's probably the least amount of waste this one turned out pretty well i'm really happy with it could have had a little fewer knots in it but it is what it is not every law can be perfect inside [Music] and [Music] you [Music] [Music] so so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] the last of it guys we processed every little bit of this we could and i think it was well worth it look at the size of the rake like in these even these two smaller ones these are only about three and a half inches wide minus a little bit of sapwood there but a lot of nice quarter saw in here guys this is why cortisol costs a bit extra processing time a lot more handling a lot more sawing a lot more trimming and uh in this case not a whole lot of waste but i mean that's all out of this log that's not everything we got out of this log right you know we have the 10 pieces we cut prior to this and then we process these two and i'll tell you what like i said the outer parts of the log have the best quarter zone and processing these out like we did pulled a lot of good quarter zone boards up there narrower yes but excellent grain patterns we're gonna go ahead and get this stacked up stickered and covered [Music] everybody that'll wrap it up here at the eye of oak sawmill again a lot of great cortisol and lumber out of that log we are very happy with the results on that one hopefully you guys learned something a very simple way of quarter sawing till you got to the end those last few pieces where we really can't at them on the mill where we had to cut them a little weird but that was a way to pull out the last of the quarter sawn out of that log if you guys don't want to do that if you want to pull those initial boards out take those four cans and just slice them through whenever you get out of them you get out of them that's fine too that's how i've seen those done before and uh that way you get a good mix of quarter zone plain saw and maybe a little rift sawn in there but a nice mixture of cuts but we went for all cortisol and out of that log and it worked out nice quality oil quality of the log really matters just got to remember that guys don't get the ones that are off center pith and crooked and knots and everything else you could quarter saw any log you want to but is it really worth it if you're if you're not turning out quality lumber so a shout out to timbergreen farms i don't know if their channel is even going anymore i haven't looked at it or haven't looked for it in a while but that's where i learned that uh easy quarter sawing method and it works for us hopefully you guys will use it and it'll work for you okay a few things before we close this one down by the time you guys see this video we will be uh i don't know elbow deep and shy but firewood at the furnace and darren woodruff will be here um this is thursday they'll be here saturday and by like i said by the time you guys get this video we will be elbow deep in them guys over here so um yeah it's going to be a good time video i'm sure you're going to get videos from all of us um on that one so check out their channels as well woodruff woods darren woodruff over there woodruff woods we've got brad firewood at the furnace down there in maryland and shine with and uh outside with shine you saw him plenty of times on our channel it's where we got the dooley great guy check out his channel as well ready gonna wrap this one up so if you have any questions about what we're doing here at the mill with the quarter sawing the sawmill the tractor anything please put it down in the comments section be glad to help you out and as always thanks everybody for stopping out and we'll see you at our next time and take care [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Iron & Oak Sawmill

Views: 26,336

Keywords: Sawmill, Wood Mizer, Black Walnut, Rough Cut, Live Edge Slabs

Id: -p3KsQPiG0I

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022