Hi, my name is Leo, and I'm a boat builder and a sailor and I'm on a mission to rebuild and restore the 1910 classic sailing yacht Tally Ho. Now, I'm rebuilding that boat in Washington State, but right now I'm in south Georgia, USA. I'm at Cross Sawmills, and I'm going to be helping Steve Cross grade the live oak timber that he's been milling into flitches for Tally Ho's framing stock. -Must be Leo!
-Yeah! Alright, how's the trip? -It was good!
-Alright! - Okay, so this is Steve Cross of Cross Sawmills.
- Correct. This is a southern live oak, scientific name Quercus Virginiana, it's the oak that grows from the Virginia around to Texas. There's other species of live oak around the world. There's 2 types in California and then there's the Mediterranean live oak, and possibly other live oaks but this Southern Live Oak, we cut the live oak frames for several ships: The San Salvador, H.M.S. Surprise repair,
Ernestina Morrissey repair, Mah Jongg yacht repair, Malibu Mogallant. What else? - The Tally Ho.
- Yeah, the Tally Ho. The thing that makes the carriage go up and down the track, this is a hydraulic motor
and a gearbox and a winch assembly This cable pulls this carriage up and down the track.
- Right, OK, and the saw stays still in-- Well it positions vertical and sideways. Right. Is that an old forklift truck? Something like that? Yeah. Well, it's actually, let's see... 1, 2, 3 -- there's parts of at least about 5. The engine right there, the black one? That's a 25-horse gas burner that operates the hydraulic system. -Then there's a 65-horse Perkins diesel right there
-Oh bloody hell.
-that operates the saw. -I love the tractor chair.
-Uh-huh, yeah.
-That's a nice touch. Hey but it's got a 9-valve system, and you got 2 methods.
Eeny-meany-miney-moe, Or you can just grab something and see what happens. - Which method do you prefer?
- I just grab something. [Starts gas engine] [Starts diesel engine] Maybe we'll get a chance to run it tomorrow, or pretty soon. - It's an amazing contraption. You built it yourself? How long did it take? - I don't know. Some pieces have been on here since the '70s. Some of the pieces are as new as 6 months or a year. I guess we'll go through the stuff we already got and count it, and then we'll mill this one. Well here I am in the back of my little pickup truck and it's all right. It's a bit cold. I am parked right next to a lake, apparently, and there's quite a lot of alligators in it, so that's interesting. Yes, there's alligators out here. 3 or 4. Later in the day, it won't surprise me if they won't be out. But ... a minimum chance they'll eat ya. - See all those trees?
- Yeah.
- Live oak. There's probably enough live oak right there to frame a 200-ton ship. But they're awful hard to handle and awful labor-intensive. This is the Spooner Live Oak. Research shows this is the biggest live oak tree in the world, which also makes it the biggest living organism east of the Mississippi River. The reason a live oak is called a live oak is because of its evergreen leaves on the tree. And that's the way it'll be 50 weeks out of the year. and then the other 2 weeks it'll be in the pollination and the leaf exchange. - How old would you estimate this tree to be?
- Our best guess is probably 400 years. But we don't really know. I know Mr. Roger said when he was a boy, 18 years old, which would be over 75 years ago, He said they used to plow with mules and they would stop and have a break under the shade of the tree, and he said he couldn't really tell it had growed that much in 75 years. They say that the extreme lifespan is like 600. 34 foot and 11 inches
which would mean, straight through, around 11 foot.
- Wow. The survey done by the US. Forest Service and the State Forestry agencies reflect 1.3 billion live oak in the United States. Within a 100-mile circle of my sawmill, I think there's 130 million. Of course, have no way of personally counting 'em.
- Of course. - So it doesn't seem like there's any shortage of live oaks.
- Correct. - Well that's good news. So these two trees by me are fairly young live oaks and they will grow to be monsters. probably, eventually, like the ones we've been looking at. You can see the distinctive leaves here. And the reason they're called live oaks is because they keep their leaves almost the entire year round only just losing them or changing them over for new leaves over a 2-week period once a year. So what we're doing today is grading and measuring all these flitches which Steve's already cut he's cut these to just over two and a half inches, which is the sided dimension of my frames. Marking off where there's big shakes or big knots or lots of bark, and taking that off, and then making a rough calculation of board-feet. This is a book. It's a historic recounting of the live oak trade but this is a ditty, written probably 1850 or before. One day, as I was traveling,
I happened to think.
My pockets were empty,
I can't get a drink. I am an old bummer
Completely dead broke
And I've nothing to do
But go pounding live oak. I started at once
For to see Captain Swift
To see and find out
Would he give me a lift? He viewed me all over
from top and to toe,
Says, "Hey, you're the boy
That live oaking must go." Then he drew up the papers
Which both of us signed,
To keep and fulfill
If we both felt inclined. But the very best wages
That he could afford
Was 25 dollars
A month, and my board. He bade me get ready
Without more delay,
And the schooner set sail
On the very next day. We landed on the wharf
Some 80 or more
Poor miserable wretches
Being tired of the shore. With two packs of whiskey
Took some tobacco and a spoon,
I was ready to set sail
For Mosquito Lagoon. Bluff was the game
That we played every night,
And in it, Charles Douglas,
He took great delight. He won my tobacco
While others cracked jokes,
Says, "Hey, you'll get more
While you're pounding live oak." Pounding live oak
Is nothing like fun,
Especially the dry ones
Will make the sweat run. It will make your axes
Glitter and smoke;
You'll need iron handles
To pound this live oak. Instead of the woods,
On a ladder I went;
I thought it much better
To my poor heart's content. All day with a pole
In my hand I would poke,
'Til I wished that the devil
Had all the live oak. It's mosquitoes by day
And midges by night
The sandflies and beagles
They bothered me quite. And if I ever at home
My head I do poke,
To hell I'll kick Swift
And his cursèd live oak. So we're at the end of our second day of measuring and tallying up all these live oak flitches. It just takes a long time. I mean, it's real guesswork, really, but you know I've got the shapes of the frames in my head. You can't really bring patterns - you'd have to make a pattern of each frame, 'cause every futtock's different. There's 88 frames, on each frame there's at least 3 futtocks. So you're looking at 240-odd futtocks at least. Each one different shape and size, so it's really not practical to to bring your patterns down for them all. So, there's a lot of guesswork involved. At some point I'm gonna have to make a call about whether we've got enough or not and the board feet are racking up of course and the cost, but the last thing I want is to get this up to Washington and then find out I haven't got enough. 25-foot bandsaw.
It's the only blade I've found that'll reliably cut live oak. This blade is a regular carbon steel blade. When you try to cut live oak with this the tips will actually round over. This is a $50 blade, this is $250. But this blade, see, it's got the carbide tips made onto it. This is called a triple chip design, and then the next tooth has got the carbide, but it's actually made with a flattened triangle chisel, Cuttin' tooth, scorin' tooth, cuttin' tooth, scorin' tooth.... See what I'm doing here, this is a forklift mast, there's a forklift, there's 2 forklifts, and then there on the back -- So there's parts of 5 fork lifts, 9 semi trailers, old sawmill parts, military Hobart welder, parking lot sweeper, fertilizer spreader, and God knows what else. So I've just been driving around the local area around the mill, coming across a lot of live oak trees by the side of the road, and this is a particularly impressive avenue. You know not just here, but all over the place, you drive around and you just find them. A lot of saplings and young and middle-aged trees as well as the more mature ones. And the Cross Sawmill, which I think is the only place milling live oak, is a really fairly small operation which I think often deals with trees that have come down naturally or been cleared. And it does seem like there's a lot of live oaks growing here, and so that's good. I would hate to be contributing to the decline of any species of tree, but live oaks seem to be doing pretty well down here. This is Robert and Robert lives nearby to where we're milling the live oak and he's a retired professor, and he lives on this piece of land with a lot of live oak trees. And he's been kind enough to show us around a little bit. - This tree was planted by my daddy 50 years ago. Well on its way to be a 200-year-old tree. You have a rough idea how many live oaks would be on this piece of property? So maybe a hundred acres of woods, and I'm sure at least a thousand. And, I mean, many of them bigger than this. You almost can't cut this. You can take a six inch thick slab of this live oak, and try to split it up to use in the stove for firewood, and you'd beat yourself to death trying to split it. 9-30 - about 20 inches here, and the 10 inches here, 10 inches just down there, 9 foot by 15 inches, 28 board-feet.
That means this flitch will cost me $170. We're just taking the solid simulated futtock and we drove over it with fork lift. We've got this other simulated futtock with a lot of internal defects, which we wouldn't actually put on a boat, but we're trying to see if we can break it. Extreme grain strength. You can see that some of the flitches are really quite swept, but you can see that other ones are really quite straight. Even the straight ones are going to be pretty useful because as I've been learning (and really the reason I chose live oak in the first place) is amazing grain strength that it has, and that's far far higher than that of regular deciduous white oak. So, for instance, in a piece like this, you could almost cut a futtock for a frame any way you want out of this The grain is so strong, even if you're cutting 45° or more to the grain, you've got a lot of run-out. It's got a huge strength and it's very very hard to split it. What that means is that I'm hopefully going to be able to use all these pieces even if they haven't got a lot of sweep in them. Of course, I'm gonna make sure I use any sweep there is to my best advantage I do have straighter frames, which I'm going to be using the straighter flitches for. The center of the ship in a boat curves up like this the rear and particularly the front goes up like this and simultaneously goes like that If the planks come to meet this curve and this curve, your futtocks have to be cut in a long spiral, and that long spiral is called a rolling bevel. So we've got an assembly here we call the Georgia ship saw and it's my interpretation of how to cut rolling bevels. This is a Milwaukee 15-amp Super Sawzall. This is a port stowe or a mini blower that we use to blow the line where we can see then the Milwaukee Sawzall is mounted on this gearbox which we have geared in to where we can tell what degrees we're turning this blade. - I don't think that's going anywhere, is it?
- Yeah. If there is a grain that's going to at least 45° right there. Sorta like a jigsaw on steroids, and I really do think it would be a positive benefit, so, I wanted to throw the saw in as part of the deal. - Thank you very much!
- Yeah, I hope it helps you out - I believe it will. All right, so I've been here a few days now, and I think we've got enough timber. We've got over 150 flitches now. I'm more or less certain that we've got enough to do all of Tally Ho's frames. It's better to have some left over than not enough because the transport costs to get all this stuff from here to Washington is gonna be about $8,000. And, don't want to find I've not quite got enough and have to get some more up. Got about 3,500 board-feet of usable timber in the flitches, not sure exactly how much weight that's going to be because obviously there's a lot of timber which hasn't been graded or tallied up, and a lot of unusable stuff around the edges and with shakes and defects and stuff. Probably looking at around 30,000 pounds of timber that's about 15 tonnes That's just a guess.
Really mind-boggling amount, actually, if you look at the stacks and think that it's all going into one boat. But, there's a huge wastage unfortunately on cutting frames out if I have all flitches left over which hopefully I might be able to sell them on, or use them in other parts of Tally Ho. All in all I'm very happy and Steve's done me a really good deal, and he's been really helpful, but it is a huge amount of money. It's the most money I've ever spent on anything, actually, by quite a long way -- by several times, possibly. So all this timber is going to cost $20,000, plus the transport to get up to Washington is gonna bring that to about $28,000 just for this one part of the hull. It's a bit painful, spending that amount of money. It's it's a lot more than I was expecting to spend when I started the project, mainly because I was being optimistic, I think which is probably where I had to be, otherwise I wouldn't have taken it on. But, you know, there's no going back now. I've got to do it, and if I'm gonna do it, I've got to do it properly, and this is the right timber to do it. This is the right way to do it and hopefully won't be regretting spending this amount of money on it. All right, well, that's it for now, folks, so thanks a lot for watching. And a massive thank you to everyone who's donated or otherwise contributed towards the Tally Ho project. It makes a really big difference, and I really appreciate it, and it means I'm able to keep making these videos. And I'll see you guys next time when I'm going to be driving back to Washington State and starting work again on Tally Ho!
Great video, the Mill owner knows his stuff and is very resourceful, its good we still have people like this. People may also enjoy Fred Dibnah
"You got kinda this Florida Panhandle thing going on where's what you really want is more like a Savanna accent which is more like Molasses just sort of spilling out of your mouth."
Came to hear a deep southern accent.
Left with an understanding and appreciate for the great live Oak tree after watching a 24 min youtube doc.
That guy pronounces words a whole hell of a lot better than %50 of the people of my hometown in Alabama.
Are there any native English speakers here who can't understand him? I know for sure there are some thick Scottish accents that I'm unable to process. I'm curious if it goes the other way.
Just watch LSU football and listen for coach O. Basically another language.
I could easily understand him. This is nowhere near the thickest southern accent I've heard, as the very thickest take some attention to understand.
Love seeing one of my favorite channels out in the wild. This guy is rebuilding this boat and it is crazy to see all the work that goes into it
He seems like a cool guy