Logs to Lumber: Alaskan Chainsaw Milling

you thank you we're here to demonstrate chainsaw number making today and I'm going to try to walk you through all of the sort of basic steps turning a nice beautiful Lodge it is some usable lumber so first thing I've gotten it raised up here on the saw horses that gets it to a more comfortable working height it also makes it a lot easier for one person to manage the log it'll roll really easily on the saw horses if you're just down on the ground then you're fighting against every Rock and root and Hollow and it's a lot tougher to roll it alone so a few moments getting it up is usually worth the effort then because it was sitting here in a bit of gravel I just took a wire brush tried to clean as much gravel as I could I'll probably end up having to resource in the saw after I make the cast so after I cut off all of the bark then I'll tell you sharpen a little but try to get it as clean as possible some folks will use a spud and clean the bark off that way I find just too time-consuming unless the barks loose already so I'm gonna start by figuring out how to Center my my milled wood inside this log so I'll determine the difference in the taper between the bottom tip everything it's kind of glued together working with these lines don't take your favorite measuring tape so I got 21 and a quarter inches here and 21 and a half inches at the butt so incredibly almost no taper on this log a quarter-inch of taper in this dimension anyways the other dimension might be a little bit different but essentially no taper which makes our job just a tiny bit easier here when a milling logs the first three cuts take up about 50% of the time once we've got the first three cuts done we've got a square log then the rest of the cuts they go really quick and you just start knocking out lots of boards which is really nice the first thing we have to do is take this a regular surface of the rough log and we have to get a flat plane above it too to use as a nice flat reference to run the mill on so measure down about an inch and a half and I'll make a level line doesn't need to be level we just need to ensure that these two plates when I install them are in the same plane so level is our easiest point of reference on the other side I'm gonna do the same thing drop an inch and a half down and install my plate making sure it's level if there was a difference between my button my tip this is the first time I've had essentially no difference if there was a difference then I would drop it farther at the bus to accommodate for that difference so that's we're centering right in the log just produces a little bit more quality lumber a little greater quantity of quality lumber okay so I'll drop my rails in the position here if my log isn't well braced or if it's smaller log there knotting this weight to one side could roll the log so I always make sure to have it block step and I'll just check that the the rails aren't sitting up on a high piece of bark anywhere I've got a good clearance here so I'm ready to cut [Music] I've got a big saw because rip cuts take more power then cross cuts and we're often pulling a big chain so I've set it down to five and a half inches right now which I know with my setup with these rails and plates five and a half inches in just clear underneath those plates but it's good to double check just to make sure I haven't forgotten or made a mistake so yeah I've got a little bit of clearance below the steel plate let me so you don't want to hit that up so I get that cut from the other side [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] you I always leave the saw idling for a few moments after I finish the cut give it a bit of time to cool down and I always make sure to walk it away from this really fine sawdust that that rip cutting producers because I find sawdust still clogged up the air filter quite quickly this slop isn't particularly heavy there's not a lot of wood left in it so I probably won't do anything else with it if you've cut a really heavy slab it's not there's no waste just flip it over and you can mill boards off of it as well but in this case I don't think it's really worth it so I'll just set it aside new slab for any sort of space siding like wood shed siding that's great for that that first cut I made will be the eventual top of our cat so now I'm going to cut off the sides and this will determine the width of the boards I'm going to get so I'm looking for boards that are both 14 and a half inches wide that's kind of about the max that our miter saw is going to comfortably cut so beyond that just gets kind of a little bit more unwieldy again I've got one more rough surface here I need to set up those rails to make the cut differences now that I also want this cut to be Square to my first cut so I can use the square okay and then we'll go to the other side so we've got two of our sides squared up here as I mentioned getting these three sides squared really takes almost half of the time in in milling a log that fourth side we're actually not going to square up at all we'll just leave it right to the end we'll cut our boards off of that fourth side so it'll just be left as our last bit of waste at the end and that saves us some time it also makes it a little bit easier to get the last word out so we'll just leave that guy now I'm looking like I mentioned for about fourteen and a half inch boards and I want those boards to be centered in the nicest wood here so I can get the greatest number of 14 and a half inch boards so I've drawn a line you might not be able to see it but we're quite high of that line so I wouldn't want you know my boards to be centered here because I have some Wayne on some of them so if I can Center them down here then that's gonna be better so anything else done about fourteen and a half inches isn't waste will get boards out of that we call those second cut or third cut boards and they're gonna be live-edge both sides so you can either use them like that or I just snap a chalk line square them up with a circular saw and I usually do that after just pile them all up on a sawhorse and then process them later so I'll drop the saw to one inch and I'll produce a one inch board here to get down closer to my line that I was intending to use on this third cut we could roll the log 180 degrees is get our square and our rails and let's flared up that way but there's actually an easier way to do that which I'll show once we get down a little bit closer so now just this flat surface we have becomes the new reference line that we're running the mill on [Music] [Applause] [Music] Oh beautiful smooth one-inch board obviously it's still live edge both sides so that one so I want to use it to the square lumber need a bit more processing so with this throw it up on a sawhorse snap a chalk line and and follow that line give me fairly square piece I need a more square I could joint it now I'm very close to that centered line so I'll do my my bottom cut now so this is where we can save a lot of time versus rolling the log again I'm just going to bring the mill all the way up so that my saw the mill is gonna run up here on this flat surface and my saw will hang way down here to make my cut down there so there's a limit bring up my mill obviously constrained by the length of some stress here and that's about 14 and a half inches so if so that will produce for me a fourteen and a half inch wide cants which I'll then roll and start cutting thirteen and a half inch boards off of it if I wanted a wider can't 16 17 inches and I could roll the log twice and just set up and cut off the top there but takes a bit more time and really 14 and a half black line is about as wide as we want to be dealing with on a regular basis so I thought that's not up ready to go I'll just point out before I make the cut so because I've got all this weight bearing down I'll use the shims usually I just put the shims kind of in any ball position just to hold the cut open but in this case all the weight is bearing right over top my saw horses so I'll need to make sure that's where I put the shims if I put the shim way out here it's still likely to close up the cut when I try to cut over the sawhorse here so just take some care put these shims in the right spot you [Music] [Music] so I've got a really big heavy slab here that's left over again not waste just don't want to deal with it now because I want to focus on the log but I can just start taking board so I'll probably get a couple of boards there they'll be live edge both sides and they'll go under the pile to be processed later with the circular saw

Channel: Lure of the North

Views: 1,415,442

Rating: 4.6061969 out of 5

Keywords: Alaskan Mill, Chainsaw Mill, chainsaw milling, alaskan milling, alaskan chainsaw mill, logs to lumber

Id: zqg_MVbe4Wg

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 08 2018