- Hey, everyone. My name is Matt. Welcome to my backyard. This time we're cutting up some boards which will be a little
different than usual. A lot of people ask, "Matt, how come I never
see you cut any boards? You're always cutting all these
live edge slabs and things." Well, I like big stuff, like really big logs. And really big logs they say to me, "Matt, I'm a big log. I need you to make me into
a big slab." (chuckling) So that's what I do. That's what I enjoy the most, is cutting the really, really big logs. At least to me, it seems like there's a lot more potential for those large logs to be
turned into larger slabs which then can be further broken down by someone actually
making them into something versus me cutting them up
into a bunch of boards. And then hopefully, someone needs that size
of board or whatever. Now on the other end of the spectrum, the small stuff, like these guys here, make pretty good boards because you kind of have
a normal size board width and it's a little bit quicker I guess, when you're processing things like this. So I have a bunch of small logs in my pile that I want to get sawn up into boards. I've got some cherry. I have a few pieces of red
oak, which are kind of smaller. I have a cool piece of
walnut, which is smaller. And I also have a piece
of cottonwood right here, which I'm excited to cut because I haven't cooked
cottonwood before, and I'm excited to see
what it's kind of like. So that should be kind of fun. If you haven't seen one of my
board cutting videos before, these, I guess sort of
general workflow for these is to turn the small log into a cant, or essentially just kind of square it up, set it aside, and repeat that process until I have a bunch of those cants all squared up and I
can slice all the cants all at once on the saw mill because the throat on the saw is so wide. I can stack a bunch of cants side by side and just make one slice and cut, four or five cants into
boards all at once. So I'm going to start off
with the cherry log up top, get that down, get it on the saw, get it squared up. And we'll see where we go from there. If you didn't see the video where I went and picked
these cherry logs up, I will leave you a link to that. That was a fun little pickup in the back of a small property. Had to go through the woods, up a hill, and it was an interesting recovery. So I will give you a link to that video if you want to check that out. (saw whizzing) (log clunks) (saw whizzing) So only a few minutes into the
video and I'm already lying. So I'm not going to
actually square this guy up, I'm going to leave it with
it's live edge on there. This one has some kind
of goofy curves to it which I want to preserve. That's going to give me
some areas of curving grain for furniture parts that
have curves in them. So ideally, or at least in my mind, some of these will become a
piece of furniture, obviously. So this piece, as well as the logs from
the rest of the tree which should be a little straighter, will give you some straight areas. This will give me some curved areas. So I have more fluid grain. So that's what I think about as I'm sawing stuff around purposes, is having some flexibility with how I can lay out my parts so that the grain makes
the most sense within them. So this one is good to go. It's on the lumber skill right now. So it has nine, four quarter boards in it, so that will get sliced
up with the other ones. So this one is good to go and come off the saw and we can grab the next log. And yes, I'm out of breath. (engine roaring) (log clunking) (saw whizzing) (log clunking) (saw whizzing) (log clunking) (log clunking) (log clunking) (saw whizzing) So you can see I'm kind of sawing a
little more conservatively. I'm going to call this hybrid sawing, somewhere between sawing
boards and sawing slabs. The biggest disadvantage of sawing slabs is the fact that as you stack them to dry, it's not nearly as compact, You don't really get to use up all of the available space as well. Boards, all edges in uniform. You can stack them all nicely together. There's a lot less dead
space in the stack. So this is somewhere between them. I'll have more material. That's not going to be thrown into the burn pile at this stage. It might later on in the shop when I make the decision of how this is going
to become a final piece but at least I have some between that this getting rid of all of my options and cutting them straight up into edged up boards versus leaving them all as live edge slabs and being able to do
whatever I want with them but not being able to
dry them as efficiently. So that's going to be it for this guy. I have one face left, which will be the first
cut that we'll make when everything is stacked
together on the saw. So that's the second long one and it looks like I have
two short cherry logs next which are pretty gnarly looking. So I don't really know what I'm going to do with these. (engine roaring) The first one was pretty cool though. So this one's a little
more uniform in shape but what's interesting with this guy, is it actually has a
burl on it right here. So let's think about how
we're going to cut that. Let's take a quick look at this guy. So we have the burl
section here in the middle and then we can see, we have this damaged area up here that actually comes up. So as we're thinking about sawing this I'm essentially going
to forget about this. I'm going to pretend this
was just cut off right here. I'm not going to bother
with cutting it off but I'm going to leave it like that. So there are two ways to think about how you want to have the
burl figure present itself in your actual boards. So if you cut in this plain here, like if I roll it over completely like this, if you were to cut it this way, you're going to have a section of burl, and a section of like
normal wood down here. So your board is going
to be like half wood, wood, burl, and than wood again. If you saw completely through the burl in this orientation, you'll have wood, burl section, and then wood again. And then once you get
down past the burl area you'll have normal wood
all the way through the whole length again. So those are kind of your two
general ways to saw burls. I'm going to saw it in this orientation, So I have wood, the hole with burl, and then would again at the top. So just like it's laying here right now. And again with this, I'm really just going to come in here and square it up or flatten it out so that it can go in the pile with all the other cants later on. And I think this time I'm
just going to leave live edge. Because I don't want to trim
off any of the excess burl. So coming here at 10 inches. (saw whizzing) All right. So again, fairly conservative. I'm just going to knock off the high spots and give
us a flat of reference to put down towards the bed. Let's have a peek. Oh yeah. You got some burl. So we have some nice
burley eyes and things. So as we're cutting into this, you can kind of see that as we get further into the meat here, we'll have a board, a burl section, the hole with burl, and then wood again, versus the other way as you would have basically just like a bulge
on the side of a board. So again, that's as far as
this one was going to go, that's our flat surface. Now I can roll it over
and slice it into boards, or this is still going
be live edged slabs, but it'll be four quarter material. So next up, we got this guy which is kind of gnarly, and kind of broken and stuff, and you can see he's got some
rot action going on there. I don't really know what
I'm going to do with this. This side looks a little bit better but it's still got a rotten pith going on. With the curve in here, You're not going to really
get actual boards out of this. So this has to be live edge slabs. Otherwise it has to be
two foot long boards which probably not
going to be super great. So I'll probably just leave that for now. Next let's do some crotch here. I got this maple crotch. This was an off cut from the
log that my buddy John gave me. If you missed that one, I'll leave you a link to that as well. But this is an upper
section crotch thingy. It's like with three feet
long, nice little crotch. Let's throw it on the saw, and at least get the flat faced on it. So it can go in the pile
for slicing up later. (wood clunking) (wood clunking) (engine roaring) (saw whizzing) All right. So that crotch is ready for slicing. I think it's getting dark, this time of year is always kind of sad, because it's only four o'clock and it's like getting there. So what have we got, I got this cottonwood, which I'm excited to saw in two, I think before I head in, though, I'm going to throw this
one off into the pile and pull out basically stage the rest of the log pile for tomorrow. One, two, three, four, five, and probably six. (engine roaring) (wood clunking) (wood clunking) Ah, good morning, everybody. It is extremely nice out today. It's already almost 50
degrees it's 10:00 AM, and it's like the week
before Thanksgiving, this is some really nice warm weather which is unseasonably warm for this time of year in Minnesota. So I was supposed to be
at the new house today, mudding the walls in the shop to get that ready to actually move into. But I ain't going to be inside today. No way. So here we are outside again, and we going to do some more sawing. First one on the saw right here is a piece of Walnut, it's about 12 feet long and we got like maybe
16 inches in diameter. My buddy Dan brought this over. He brought me the big log. The big maple log with the
integrated bird feeder. And he had these two walnut logs and he's like, I was going to
cut this into a four quarter, and he has a chainsaw mill, and here's a little something, friends don't let friends
cut four quarter boards with the chainsaw mill. That's a lot of labor
for a tiny little board. So I told him just to bring them over, and I will slice them up for him. And he's okay with the timeframe, which is whenever I get around to it. And it has been seven months. So here we go. Another little thing since yesterday, I think we're going to have
two different thickness or two different rounds of cutting, a four quarter round, and
a eight quarter round. So the eight quarter
round is going to allow me to just slice up this crotch
piece here into eight quarter which is probably a better
for something like that. I also have this larger piece of red oak, which would be better as eight
quarter versus four quarter. So for sure those two will
go through as eight quarter, and then the rest of
this stuff to go through as four quarter. So I have this second
walnut log here from Dan, which I'll cut as well. So let's get going on
this first guy right here. You can see this ones
got this little bend, In the top area here. Waiting for the airplanes. (plane engine roaring) All right. So normally you would just
whack this off of here and this would be like a waste piece. But I'm just going to leave it on. It's going to make this end to the board look a little bit like skinny and narrow, but I'd rather just leave it on there and then cut this off and have nothing to do with this because I already got
enough stuff laying around. So I'm going to leave it in. So in this case I have oriented it, So it's bent over this way. So it's not affecting how
the log is sitting level on the bed right now. So you can see it's still very consistent as it sits on there. And then this isn't really impacting how it's sitting at all. So same general process,
with this one again we're going to get three sides squared up and get that third side
set on a lumber scale, so it can get back on
with all the other cants. (wood clunking) All right, is everyone
who is going to tell me how they don't like the I feed my saw have they left their comment
thread to let me know. No? All right I'll wait. (airplane engine roaring) (Matt chuckling) So as you can see on this one, the end of that log has
got that big bend in it. So I'm just leaving it on there and turning it into saw mill waste versus a firewood around
waste essentially. (saw whizzing) (wood clunking) (saw rolling) (saw whizzing) (wood clunking) (engine roaring) (wood clunking) (wood clunking) All right. This one's a little
straighter than the last one. (wood clunking) (saw whizzing) (wood clunking) (wood clunking) (saw whizzing) (saw rolling) (wood clunking) (saw whizzing) (saw rolling) All right. This one's squared up enough. Again I'm cutting fairly conservatively. So we'll get this one set aside, and then the one I'm most excited for is the cottonwood, which is next. (engine roaring) (wood clunking) (Matt yelling) (Matt grunting) (wood clunking) This one should be pretty interesting. You can see we have the
buttress route down here which is going to give us
some figure down this area and you can already see that's all curl through here. So you can see the undulation here. That's curly green within here. And it looks like it's
been sitting for a bit. We got a little bit of
Spalting starting to form. So this should be pretty cool. I have it oriented like this, so this will get cut off but I think we'll wind
up cutting this again and we'll get some interesting
little pieces out of it. But also raise up this end down here to level out a little
bit and get things going. So I'm going to start getting
this thing cut up into our cants again probably going to
saw pretty conservatively. Just keep the most material
in the cants as possible. All right. Let's have a quick look. (wood clunking) It's just like kind of weird. It's like, I don't know, it's wet, like it should be but it's like almost gummy, the sawdust, weird. Definitely a very blonde
wood that's for sure. All right, let's roll it. (wood clunking) (saw whizzing) (wood clunking) (saw whizzing) Yeah, this stuff saws differently. It's like the saw dust is
much clingier or something. Maybe it's the high fibrosity of the wood. I don't know, I don't know. A little bit goofier. Okay, I think we should
be good enough right now to start cutting some boards. What have we got one, two, three, four, five, and then six. (engine roaring) So I'm
going just grab the grapple and we'll get these logs
laid up onto the saw. Maybe we'll just call this one, Matt plays with the grapple. I swear it feels like I'm doing. The giant claw game. (wood clunking) (wood clunking) (engine roaring) I guess I don't have
quite the throat width that I thought I did for this. Let's see, are these all the way over? Yeah. Okay. That's good. At least some these one's with like, live edges. What did I do here? This is the wrong way. It's too early for this. I can't think (wood clunking) there we go. I think I'm still going to be, not enough room for that cottonwood. Yeah, this is going to be a little tight. That's all right. We'll do the cottonwood separately. Okay. So now with all these on here, all I have do now is just
walk down the lumber scale, which I have a four
quarter scale over here. So if you've seen one of these before, these indicators on here
are four quarter boards. These are going to give you an inch and an eighth thick board, plus it counts for the curve of the blade. So all I have to do is just come down and
hook in increments here. Our first one's probably
going to be around here, and I'll step down until
we get all way down to one. Eventually we'll start cutting into probably these ones first, those first ones will
become the waste cuts and then we'll keep going down. We'll get through all the waste, and then we'll start having some full width boards, or full length boards. (saw whizzing) (wood clunking) We're going to scoot this
second one back a little bit. (engine roaring) It's like
just outside the range of the winch feed. (saw whizzing) This next tail will be
skimming the one in the middle, and cutting into the one on the end. Number eight position. (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) So I'm really excited to take
a look at this cherry log, because we should be able
to start seeing the burl, as we get down past (wood clunking) probably like this past the pith. So this is pretty standard cherry. Super crazy going on here. We got a little bit of like a rot stain kind of thing going on here in the middle, which I actually like, you can see we're
starting to get into some burl action right here. It's a little bit of a wave of green here. As we're getting down into part of that burl. Let's see, I'll keep going here. (wood clunking) (wood scrapping) It's more interesting figure
and things going on down here. A lot of interesting,
weird stuff going on here as we're getting to the core of the burl. And a little more interesting, weird stuff going on there, which is good. You got some discoloration from, here we go. There was this old limb here, that's letting some rot staining down into the rest of the tree. There we go. Right here. So we've got this kind of old limb. That's creating all of this
stain still structurally fine. Just got discoloration. Oh yeah. Look at that. That is cool. I don't know what that looks like. Something weird. (Matt chuckles) Something real goofy. And then this is the last one, I think. Second last one? Second last one. Now we're into a little more of the burl. That is really cool. You got a little bit of burl action peeking out around some wood. So as we discussed at the beginning this is what I was kind of talking about. You got a full width burl area and you have wood top and bottom, versus the other way you would cut it. You would have essentially like
a bulbous thing on one side and you have wood, wood, wood burl. So a couple of different
ways to present it to the face of the board. And then down here, more kind of burly action as well. So that's pretty cool. That's going to make something
really sweet someday. Whenever I figured out
what it wants to be. So for the rest of these I think I'm just going
to fork them off of here, and I'll have them to stack. They're going to go over to
the other property anyway. So (wood clunking) if I just
fork them off like this, I can throw them on the
trailer as a whole unit. So I'm going to get them off of here, and then the walnut, we'll take a little peek at, that again is going over to my buddy, Dan, so he's got to come get them, get them out here. See what we got here in the middle. Let's take a little peak. Ooh, that is some clean looking walnut. Let's take a little peaky, whatever that means (water splashing) As always, walnut's going to be pretty well green kind of hue, when it's fresh to sun. And then it will oxidize
to the color you expect. The more, I don't know, purple,
the brown kind of color. So this stuff is pretty clear. Like that's some pretty clear walnut We're at a bit over 12 inches wide. I think this is like 14 wide. So pretty good looking. You can see oxidization down here already, as it oxidizes from the end grain. Man that's beautiful. Beautiful. (engine roaring) (engine roaring) (wood clunking) All right. Let's see if we can get this cottonwood sliced up real quick. Oh man, this thing's like slimy. It's weird. (wood clunking) I think I might actually just cut this with this live edge on here. That might be kind of cool actually. So roll back. (wood clunking) Something crazy here. I'm just going to get the saw back to slicing up boards and we're
just to run through this and see what we get out of it. (saw whizzing) (wood clunking) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (wood clunking) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) So since I have no idea what
I'm going to do with this yet, I left that bottom one
there as two pieces. So it's a like nine quarter'ish. So lucky made some thicker material if I need it. Oh man these are cool. I'm excited to show you these things. That's got some figure. I'll tell you what, this stuff saw is kind of weirdly like even the saw dust is different. It's like stringy or something. I don't know. Maybe it's just super fibrous. I mean, that's just weird. So let's see, this is, this is cherry. So it's a little, I guess dustier. This is like, I don't know, it's different, very weird. It's definitely a different sawing wood. And you can see like how fibrous it is, just by all the little, right, my finger, All the little pulled fibers. So I think it's just like
a really fibrous tree, which makes sawing a little bit different than normal things, I guess. So I want to take a look at these little, let's call them medallions, or something like that. This has got some really
really cool compression figure from around that root. Yeah, there we go. Some really cool figure and color and just a really awesome looking piece. So I'm glad I cut these things up. because I don't know what I'm
going to do with this yet, but it's kind of small, but man it's got some
really cool figure in it. So it makes some nice little box tops for like a little box or something. It's a good size for that. That's a good amount of
figure in these things. These are pretty cool. (water splashing) I don't know, it's kind of a cool wood. it's almost the silver mapley, because it has some of those same hues, but a little more subdued. So it's got the reds and the
grays and the blues in there and the yellows. It's like silver maple does but it's not as vivid I guess, more blonde. And what's interesting is I thought that this would be
something like spalting, but there isn't a whole lot of
spalting penetration in here. Just a little bit of
discoloration right here. That's it. interesting. Didn't really go that far. (wood clunking) Let's take a quick look. (airplane engine roaring) It's what the wood looks like. It is very blonde. Yeah. This is a good one. (water splashing) Yeah, it's like fuzzy. Very weird. That's kind of cool though. It's got a really, really light, almost elm like grain look to it, because it has sort of a elm look kind of like that with the grain, but the color is more, I don't know, yellow. I don't know. Very blonde. Very cool though. (wood clunking) Got some kind of reds and stuff down here. (wood clunking) That's kind of interesting. My big thick one here. (wood clunking) It's got my nail on it right there. So I got a little tiny nail, right there. Nothing too big. (water splashing) Yeah, it's pretty cool. I think color wise, this
is pretty awesome stuff. Yeah. That's nice. Pretty happy with this. So we'll get the stuff stacked and dried and then sometime Matt will work with
cottonwood for the first time. We'll see what that's like. (engine roaring) (saw whizzing) (engine roaring) (saw whizzing) (engine roaring) (saw whizzing) (engine roaring) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (engine roaring) (saw whizzing) (wood clanking) (wood clanking) (wood scrapping) (wood clanking) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (saw whizzing) (engine roaring) (wood scrapping) Welcome to the future. So I'm out stacking this stuff finally. I'm in the, I guess the side horse shelter on the property starting to fill this one up. So this stuff is going
to go in the back here. I'm going to end up keeping all of this. So this is stuff that I'll
use sometime in the future and I don't need it to
be super accessible. So it's all going to stack back here. We're going to take a
little peek at some stuff and then yeah, wood. So this is the first time that I've actually transported
water for this purpose out of necessity because
this is nowhere near a water source. Well, we're going to be a
little bit conservative here with the water today. So this cherry's got some normal, really nice cherry color, but you can see we did have some pith rot. So the very center of the
tree has a bit of rot in it. And what's interesting as you can see, the pith is entering and
exiting these two faces here. So kind of a cool look, but again, with this one I'm really excited about the curvature in the grain. It'll make for some really
nice curved furniture parts. Like this nice saw curve here, which would be great for, you know, the arch top of the cabinet or something
along those lines. I know a thing the rot does. And we've talked about this in the past, is it does change the color a little bit. So you have the actual rot, so this is punky but then you also have the
staining associated with it which makes a much
deeper, richer red color. So this is actually stained through here because of that rot right there. Now these are the cherry boards. These are from the, I guess, one of the other
sections of that log, or I guess from whatever. The log that got cut into edge boards, some really nice color. And I think overall more than anything, my frame of reference is so skewed because I've been cutting
big stuff for so long that when I first got these logs I was like, those are small logs. This is a typical width board, even like a wide board in most instances, this is probably 10 inches wide or so. So my perspective has
definitely been skewed on the size of logs versus
what you get out of them. So I was expecting much
smaller boards out of these. So here's a closer look, a
little more rough and fuzzy kind of looking at this point, but color looks pretty good. Okay. We got a piece of
cherry and now we have some of that red oak. Kind of want to see what
this red oak looks like. It looks like it's pretty clear. (water splashing) Yeah. Ain't bad. - It's actually pretty nice looking. We've got a little bit of a fun color around that knot there, but generally though there's not really knots
and things down there, same thing going going on down here. A couple of knots there, but really really clear stuff, not bad. And then we've got some more cherry here. There we go. Cherry, red oak, red oak, red oak. So this is that kind
of shorter red oak log, that was a little bit bigger. Cut this at eight quarters since it is kind of a wider piece of wood gives a little more opportunity
to use some thicker material for other things within a project. So this stuff ended up being,
you know, fairly clear. We've got a few central knots here but otherwise pretty nice and clear as far as
the grain is concerned. Now, of course, these are the ones that I am most excited about little crotch slabs. Very nice. Got some nice crutch
figure in these things. And of course, silver
maples got that nice, you know reddish yellow orange hue. And that's nice. (engine roaring) So in a future video you'll see me cut the two red oak logs unless maybe you're watching
this far out to the future. In which case you've maybe seen the video. That is the last time I use
the saw mill of the old house. These are the last two
logs that I cut there. And when I cut them, I just cut them and just
forked them onto the trailer to bring them here. So I had not looked at these at all. So we're going to take a
look at these real quick. Let's take a look at a couple of these, or a few of these. So this is some red oak. It's got a nice kind of fun crotch kind of curve thing in it. And that is pretty darn cool. So this guy actually
has a little bit of rot. So there was probably an
the old lynn somewhere in this area and we've
got some rot infiltration. So all of this is punky. It's kind of like grayish stuff, but then the area around it, this darker area that's just stains. So it's just discolored because it's close to that rot, but that is a cool piece of wood. This is definitely a
pretty interesting because as we're getting here towards the center we have some ray fleck here
from being quarter sawn. We also have, you know, the
rot standing in the middle and then we have a nice
dash of crotch figure up in the top bit there. That is a really interesting
looking piece of wood that's for sure. All right. Let's take a look at this guy. Ooh Pretty. We are through a lot of the crotch figure there at the top. down here though, we are a quarter sawn. So we got some interesting
fun ray fleck down there and you know, most of the
crotch figure is gone now. We have a little dash
of figure on this side. So I'm going to throw these
last two up onto the stack. And then we'll just quickly take a look at that little guy back there. (engine roaring) This one looks like it's
kind of towards the middle and got a bit of quarter sawn grain. So yeah, there's some
ray fleck on these guys. We'll do them both. Let's just do these two
they're book matched. So yeah, these ones have
a kind of a fun shape with a little slight curve in them. And then we are into a quarter sawn grain as you can see this one's got some pretty heavy ray fleck going on there. And this one's got quite a bit too. Those are nice. (wood clunking) (wood clunking) (wood clunking) (engine roaring) So it sort of surprises me, even though I've done it for a long time, like how much wood is produced by, you know, relatively small logs. So that's a pretty good size stack. Still plenty of room in
this little area here for plenty more, which you know, will be here soon. Well, soon enough. So that's all the small logs from the driveway that were sitting there I guess last year. So we're getting down to the last of all the sawing that
happened at the old house. I think there is one more
to go, which would be the last time that I use
the saw at the old house. So look for that coming up soon. So thank you as always for watching. I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments about small logs or anything on the sawmill, or back in the shop, please feel free to leave
me a comment as always. I'll be happy to answer any
questions you might have and until next time happy woodworking.
