Salvaging Storm Damage

this is all about the aftermath from a storm we had in January the storm started out with a lot of wind and then we lost power then it got really cold and the power was out for 4 days at the beginning of the storm when it was windy a tree tipped over onto our house it didn't really do any damage it just kind of scraped the flashing along the edge of the roof so we were really lucky in that regard my wife had the good sense to call our arborists immediately and amazingly they came out the next day and trimmed the tree down to a stick my fear was more wind was going to push the tree into the house more and actually do some damage to the house and as it usually happens with these cold snaps in Portland either going into the cold or coming out we get an ice storm and that's exactly what happened so coming out of the cold we got ice and this would have waited the tree down I think if the branches and the leaves were still on the tree and it probably would have done real damage to the house so we were super lucky that we got the tree trimmed when we did now many trees in the area came down either from the wind at the beginning of the storm or towards the end from the ice I did sort of a little Tour on my bike just the other day looking at what the damage looks like now and there's still many places where you can see that trees are down or trees are cut up into smaller pieces so a related story but still related to the storm through a neighbor through another neighbor I found out about a big oak tree that had come down unfortunately had it had come down on the neighbor's house and done quite a bit of damage it had been cut up into smaller pieces so I got a bunch of it first just as firewood and looking at it there were a few pieces that were big enough that it seemed like I could actually get some useful wood out of them they weren't as long as a log that I could get a nice big slab out of but I could get some shorter slabs so the day I went over to start cutting these bigger pieces up my big Milling saw just would not start I kept pulling and pulling and pulling on the cord and it just wouldn't start so finally I gave up in frustration and took it into my sawce shop and they took it and they said it would be probably 2 to 3 weeks before they could get to it now the homeowner with the wood wanted to get started repairing their house which I completely understood so they wanted the wood moved somewhat quickly I had I think two weeks or so to to cut the wood up so I really needed my big saw back I started with my smaller saw without the guide on it and just trying to freehand some slabs out of some of the rounds that were there and this kind of worked I think I can use these I cut them thick enough that I have enough extra that I can shape them down to something usable during this time I started to think about the saw that was sitting on a Shelf at the Saw Shop doing nothing and doing a little research and kind of thinking maybe it's just the spark plug at least that's my hope so I went back into the Saw Shop after a couple of days and I asked if I could take my saw out and get a new spark plug and just put that in in the parking lot and see if I could get the saw to start the person I was talking to said it probably wasn't the spark plug in all of my thinking about this I had a second question could I pay a little extra to just have them look at the saw like immediately instead of it just sitting on a shelf for 3 weeks for someone to then look at it for 15 minutes and he went in the back and he talked to the other people there and he came back out and he said oh yes if you pay $50 we'll look at it right away and I said that's very worth it they said they would get right on it and I left and I got a call about half an hour later and they said my saw was working and I could come pick it up so I came back in and he said it was a spark plug and they didn't charge me the $50 and I just paid for the $4 spark plug and I had my saw back after about 3 days so sometimes it pays to poke and prod and ask questions some of the bigger chunks I started to do a little wood turning I cut a piece to make a sphere I thought would be sort of fun there just these big chunks of wood I was a little worried that turning a sphere like this out of green wood that the sphere will just crack over time as it dries I figured it'd be a quick little thing to do with some of this wood that I gotten it's either going to be firewood or it's going to be something that I can have a little fun with I put a hole where I thought the center should be and I cut an edge into that end of the piece and that'll work with the Chuck that I have and I can hold the other side up with a tail stock then it's just a matter of turning a sphere I can get it balanced by turning it into a cylinder I found my regular spindle gouge works pretty well for this kind of stuff it takes off more material than the bow gouge so I was using the regular big gouge on this and the first pass is to just kind of make it close to a sphere then I can start going through the steps of rotating it the first thing to do is to clean up the drive cup I find it always changes slightly over time if I have it used it for a little while I guess you'd call this dressing it I can put the sphere between the two cups and turn a different axis I've done this many times before so I just go around and around turning each axis into a round shape as you rotate the sphere between the cups it gets more and more sphere likee I didn't go all the way to a finished surface I left it pretty rough I figure it's going to dry and probably crack a little bit and probably warp a little bit too just because it's a big thick piece of wood and it may take a decade to dry and I put some wax paint on it and I left it to dry you can see it's still fairly rough there's a big sort of Branch intrusion in it and it is starting to crack a little bit on one side but we'll see what happens with it it's just kind of a starter piece I had my big hilling saw back so I started another one of the log sections and instead of putting my ladder on I tried to cut a flat surface on the top of that piece which kind of worked it's got a little bit of a bow to it but I think it'll be okay I tried to make it a little more level now I have my Long Bar on the saw there's another one of these rounds that's a crotch piece and it's a little wider and I wanted to have the Long Bar for that so it looks a little odd on this piece it's a little longer than it really needs to be and this definitely worked better and I got flatter straighter slabs out of the log section some of these I may mill again on the band saw on the shop so I'll cut them in half and then resaw them in half on the band saw just so they'll dry quicker also the oak tends to crack when it's thick like this so it might be worth spending the time to Mill These down a little bit but thick like this they'd be nice for making seats or coffee table tops it'd be nice to be able to carve into that thickness with the CNC machine even just making a topographical map with one of them would be really interesting I took one of the logs into the shop and I painted the ends of those and once that paint was dry I cut these into square sections hoping maybe someday I can use them as Mallet heads we'll see if I can get them to dry without cracking I think this is Red Oak and I think it doesn't shrink quite as much as the White Oak that I cut up a few years ago it'll either make nice Mallot heads or I'll have nice Square pieces of firewood and I got the ladder out to work on this wider crotch piece and it's a little weird having the ladder so long compared to the piece of wood but it shouldn't really matter just a matter of threading the ladder through the saw to get it to the piece of wood and you can see why I need the width of the bar now with how wide these are still too heavy to move but I got a whole bunch of nice slabs out of that piece these are stacked in the carport I'm not sure how I would have moved fullsize slabs of this tree even these shorter pieces are about the limit of what I can move I would have needed a friend to help move anything larger than these and I put wax paint on the ends I hope this helps my paint bottle was starting to clog I think the paint paint's getting old is getting frustrating trying to get it to come out so I added another stack on top of that original stack so this is what the whole stack looks like now and I put a section of the of a branch I guess on the top just to weight everything down so at the very bottom of this section there was a nice piece for turning I thought so I cut a piece into a bowl shape with the chainsaw and it's about the limit of what I could lift I don't know that this is the biggest thing I've ever turned but I think it's the heaviest thing I've ever turned attached to face plate and carefully got it on the lathe it was a big enough diameter that I couldn't get the lathe banjo under the piece so I had to work only from one side which was a little challenging and I used the gouge it worked pretty well at least on the outside then I flipped the piece around I drilled out the center and I could cut the center out I started doing this with the bow gouge and then I figured out that the scraper works really well on this wood even though it's more of a finishing tool it actually removed enough material it worked [Music] well dated it and it can sit now for a little while a few years I also got a couple of cookies for some reason they' cut off the stump but it was a little too thick to move so I cut a slab off of this piece this might make a nice coffee table at some point this is a different piece but it shows how I got it in the truck I hadn't brought my ramps so I stacked up some pieces that let me sort of roll round piece up into the bed you can see it's it's about the limit of what I can lift and have another sort of crotch piece I guess it's a crotch piece I can cut this piece up I think this piece I stacked on top of the other section that I put in the carport this piece made Pentagon shaped pieces that I could roll I had been walking the other slabs over to the truck as a way to move them as they were they were just too heavy to lift this end on this piece actually would have made a nice wood turning I realized after I started cutting it but even cut into quarters the pieces were too heavy to move so I really had to cut it into smaller pieces to get it in the truck I cut up a few of the pieces I brought home I thought I would wood turn some of these pieces I have a few of these that I still haven't turned yet they're sitting packed in sawdust waiting for me to get to them I have this giant pile of Oak sitting in front of the shop now that I need to either turn into projects or firewood so this was one of the smaller pieces so with this one I drew a circle onto it and then I cut that circle out on the band saw the blade I've got on this saw is a 1-in blade so it doesn't really do curves very well so what I end up having to do is a bunch of straight sections to make something that's sort of a circle as long as I keep my fingers out of the way it works pretty well I made two bowls out of this material one I made really thick and I thought what I would do is let that dry and then I might carve into that shape either add some spikes like I've done before I've got an idea for for that or just some kind of carving and I did a bowl that I turned really thin and I didn't paint that one and I'm just letting it dry and so far it hasn't cracked it started to warp a little bit but it's actually dry nicely I think turning it thin is helpful one one it just dries faster but I think it may also because it's thin it doesn't have as much stress in the wood so hopefully it won't crack I'm kind of wondering now if I try and turn something as as thin as I can go like really thin like an eighth of an inch thin now that this one's round it goes a little faster and turning it thick means I don't have to take out as much from the inside but it also means it's going to take a while to dry and it also May Crack because it's so thick and I put some wax paint on this one and I can date it I've learned that I I will not remember what this bowl was unless I something on it so I did another Bowl so this isn't one of the thinner thick bowls this is just another one that's similar to the first giant bowl that I did it's just smaller and what's different about this one is I drilled a hole at the center and I used my jig which is just two pieces of wood screwed together with a screw pointing up at the right distance from the blade so I I can have the workpiece rotate around that screw and get a circle that way it's more just sort of rot cutting the pieces to get to the circle but it works about as well what it does do is it lets the flat face face down and I can have the outer bark face face up where I can't really draw a circle I'll show this one really fast I did the outside got it round made a place for the Chuck took a off took the Chuck off flipped the piece around put it on the Chuck and haul it out the inside and with this one I I just started right away with the scraper it works pretty well for this and it wasn't quite deep enough I really wanted to get the sides and the bottom to an even thickness I think that helps in keeping it from cracking I'm also wondering how much of having only Heartwood in the piece helps with not cracking as well but we'll see it's all kind of an experiment and a date and what it is now back to the tree that fell on our house so our arborists were back a few weeks later with a crane and they could take the trunk out and I told them I wanted it in longer section so I could Mill it up which they understood having the crane really makes this easy especially since it's so close to the house when they took all the branches off the trunk leaned back off the house by about a foot all of that weight from the branches was holding it against the house so it had just been sitting there almost touching the house for a few weeks and the last chunk for some reason they lifted really high in the air and I'm not sure why they did that but it was I know it was kind of funny I really hate to think what would have happened if that had fallen from that height as this was the the thickest possibly heaviest piece of the three before I mild those pieces up I've seen in videos other people who have added a winch to their chainsaw Mill this seemed like a good idea as it's really hard to do this by yourself where you have to run the chainsaw and push the mill through the wood so I had bought a hand winch actually a few years ago and it's just been sitting waiting for me to put onto the mill so I finally decided I I really should do this before I cut up these three logs and looking at it it looked like because of the way that round tube piece on the top was I wanted to flip everything around so the winch would be on the side that the round pipe piece isn't so I sort of mirrored everything it's the kind of thing where you get it all flipped around and everything back together and then oh this thing hits this other thing wrong and you just can't do it that way but in the end it it worked fine and it seemed to be the the way to go so now you can see the the winch can go on the side where the tube piece isn't and the way I've seen other people do it they attach the winch with the bolts that hold the inners of the winch together to the mill but it didn't seem like the way mine was set up that was going to work so I decided I should just drill two holes into the winch and just use two new separate bolts to attach it and not worry about trying to make it attach with its own Hardware I wondered about making a wood blocking or wood brace or something something that would go between the mill and the winch but I decided in the end that the simplest cleanest way to do it would be to just add two new holes to the winch and just bolt it directly to the mill and the holes ended up not being that hard to drill I did a a small drill B first and then a larger drill bit through the smaller hole and that seems to work pretty well especially in steel I to take the end off to get the wind on it looked like one of the bolts I was going to have to shorten slightly as it was going to hit the gear or the the part that holds the string on the inside of the winch so I cut a bolt down with the bolt cutters and I ground off the end where the cut was just to clean it up a little bit I like to put a nut onto the bolt before I cut it then I can unthread the nut off of the bolt and that'll clean up the threads a little bit the other issue was the bolt fits into the track in the frame of the mill but there's a little square section that works when the bolts going into wood it sticks up and it doesn't allow you to really tighten the nut and the bolt into the track so I had to cut off a little bit of that square section on the bolt and I did that with the metal a and it doesn't really have to be pretty it just has to be out of the way now I can put everything together I did manage to get the spool for the string or for the Rope out of the winch and that helped in getting the bolts in and I got everything together and something was hitting something wasn't quite working because it wasn't going all the way around easy enough and and I looked closely and the little part that holds the end of the Rope was hitting my bolt so my bolt wasn't short enough so I had to take everything apart and cut the bolt a little shorter regrind it rethread it and then it worked so not a big deal but it's always a little frustrating when it's all together and then there's some step 12 steps back that you need to go and redo because it isn't quite right but once it was together it seemed to be holding it really well and it seemed like it was going to work and I managed to put it in a place where the handle on the winch won't hit the column on the mill I wasn't exactly sure where it should go what way would would make it work well while doing the Milling as the Rope needs to pull the whole Mill down the length of the saw so I attached the Rope and it seemed to wind pretty well so I measured a 12T length over to the band saw and I took the Rope over there I figured that was probably the length of most logs that I would ever have to do with this and I cut the rope at that length and I can wind the Rope up for some reason if I've got a longer log I can put put a different rope on I figured the winch probably wasn't going to hold a huge 50ft length of rope so that's why I cut it I melted the end so it won't Fray I made a little stack of bolts and nuts to hold the other end of the rope and just made a slip knot to go around that and I can put the saw into the middle now or the guide I guess and the the guide just clamps to the bar of the saw I can reach the trigger on the saw and turn the winch that's what I was wondering about I can finally get to the logs they've been sitting for about a month now I needed to roll them just a little bit one to get to the face that I wanted to start with and to get them apart enough that I would have space to to work around each of the logs I made some little wood blocks that I used with the car when I'm changing a tire and they work perfectly to hold the logs in place I was trying to figure out which face I really wanted to start with with the first one it didn't matter too much it was pretty much round I did need to do a little prep work on them it's really nice having a second saw when you're doing the chainsaw Milling cuz you want a saw that you can do this kind of stuff and not have to pull your Mill apart to do this then we can attach the ladder to the first log it looked like one end was just slightly smaller than the other end so I lifted the ladder up about 3/4 of an inch and that'll hopefully give me slabs that'll go through the center of the log and it's just matter of attaching the ladder I'm always a little bit afraid of hitting those screws with the chainsaw I think I did a depth of 4 and2 in to start so I was going to do the first pass without the winch as this one's usually pretty fast but I was starting to push on it and it's like well I might as well try it so I ran the string through the ladder and it worked really well it worked surpris amly well I can do this by myself without a second person pretty easily and I put a clamp on the ladder just for something for the Rope to go around I can take the ladder off I decided to do the first cut with the ladder on all three logs so I could leave the depth on the mill the same so once I did the first log I could do the second log I put the piece back on the log so that it would be protected from the sun and it wouldn't start to dry out that cut surface and I did the third log and that was good for one day one morning I guess I made a little jig with two pieces of 2x4 that I could attach to the bottom of log and attach a clamp and I can use that to hold the string I thought about making something fancier but I decided it can just be really simple all it's got to do is hold that string and it's got to hold the string away from the log just a little bit so that you can get to the end with the chainsaw so I found I would have to start the chainsaw a little bit without the winch get it into the log where it could sit and then I could pull the Rope out and loop it around the clamp once I did that then I could just Mill the log by pressing the trigger on the chainsaw and turning the winch sometimes I'd have the ratchet turned on but I was finding more and more it was nice to not have it on because sometimes I'd go too fast and I would bog the saw down and it was nice to be able to go backwards with the handle and take a little bit of the tension off of the Rope and the wood looked pretty nice I didn't have someone to help move the slabs so I got my dolly out and I found with the right technique and a little bit of patience I could get the slab onto the bed of the dolly and I just put these pieces in the carport so it was just a little ways away and flat I also figured out pretty quickly I could use the dolly as a ramp to get the slabs in place so I didn't have to lift the slabs up onto the stack I also figured out how to know which way to put the slab onto the dolly so that it would show up at the stack at the right orientation and I wouldn't have to flip anything around I could just slide it into place it started to get harder as the stack got taller and I Mill the other logs the first log was a little slower and I'm wondering if I had a little bit of a Twist to the cut that might have been slowing the chain down on the Chain Saw cuz the second two logs went much quicker and were much easier I think I had a straighter cut on those I think it's super important on that first cut with the ladder to make sure the the cut is straight [Music] the very last one I was able to lift and tip the final section of the log up so I had a little bit of gravity help I think this was the last one I did with the dolly I think I had two more slabs after this and I had my wife help lift them into place so I don't really have final project on this video except for this stack of wood this was kind of like a video about all the prep work before doing a [Music] project thanks for watching

Channel: frank howarth

Views: 166,625

Keywords: frank howarth, frank makes, Woodworking, woodturning, craft, craft making, DIY, wood shop, art, reclaimed, reclaimed wood, reclaimed wood project, how to DIY, chainsaw mill, DIY chainsaw mill, making wood slabs, cutting wood slabs, chainsaw mill winch, chainsaw mill winch diy

Id: wiFyEiuzNKs

Length: 31min 4sec (1864 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2024