Sawmill School - Fun Cuts with Your Portable Sawmill

hi I'm Dave boy spotter shop hollow tree farm and portable sawmill and one of the things I love about saw milling is you don't know what's inside the logs and it's it's fun it's like when I was a kid we had Cracker Jacks and I'd get a box of Cracker Jacks as a treat and first thing idea is just pour out the Cracker Jacks and dig through and find out what was inside cutting logs is a lot like that you don't know what's going to be inside usually it's something special and something pretty cool sometimes it's not a pleasant surprise but you take that along with the good as well but this video is about some of the fun that I have and then the enjoyment that anyone can have running a sawmill and I've got some log staged up ready to go that have been accumulating for a while oh that's oddball stuff log they're too short or crooked or the species that I haven't had gotten around to cutting yet and this is a good opportunity to throw some of that stuff up on the mill have some fun and see what's inside them so that's some carry pieces just too small for the sawmill so I'm going to put them on upright like this I'm going to cut cross-sections your cookies from them and those can be used for different things a lot of people like them for weddings that sort of thing so might be floor tiles we just have to see so anyway kind of an experiment to see how that clamped down hills these boards squeeze them together and it's a it's a scrap board probably wouldn't make good lumber anyway because it's off the edge of a can't so I'm going to sacrifice it in I'll cut straight down as I go cut strips off the board too and now I can always use that for stickers so it won't go to waste try not to waste anything around here so it's got to be careful if you do this is take your feed right really easy and you want and clamp down pretty securely so don't try to spin on me so let's see if it works [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] alright so there's a couple dozen cookies fresh off the mill so to speak and they're popular weddings can put wedding cakes on that sort of thing and if I get sold for a couple bucks apiece that's not bad 15-20 minutes worth of work really no investment in material that was just all scrap anyway so anytime I can turn a little bit of scrap wood into cash that's not a bad deal and I enjoy it too so now here's a real dilemma what on earth would you do with a piece of wood like this this is L and it came from a tree service he said if I wanted it I could take it home I didn't turn them down interesting thing about Elm is at the base it tends to have these flutes to give it a real interesting shape but it also makes it a little more challenging to cut on the sawmill so I've been looking at it for a while and what I've decided to do is take my chainsaw I'm going to cut off a couple cookies just to have cross-sections to play with I think they might make interesting tables that type of thing you see the tree rings and the interesting shape and that'll give me a product that I can sell and I'll still have about a five-foot section that I've put on the sawmill and get some slabs out of it and who knows maybe I'll make a slab table out of this part and then a couple of end tables reach in out of the out of the fluted part so we'll see what the tree gives us on this [Music] you [Music] well I probably let these sit longer than I should have you can see they're already spalted and that could be a good thing can make some pretty wood if you treat it right otherwise it'd just be scrapped but especially this other piece here it's got a nice shape to it potentially some nice figure and we'll see what we get meanwhile you've got enough log there we put it on the mill and get some slabs out of it [Applause] it this tree had a pretty rough life but the slabs tell quite the story this came to me I got it from a tree service it cut it out of the yard in Springfield Missouri and you see the curve to the green this is what the tree looked like when it was growing up as a sapling it was crooked it had a fork that came out here that broke off at some point and what some people might call defect I call it character the slab itself is about 29 inches wide a little over 4 feet long and got just a whole spectrum of colors ranging from kind of a smooth cream-colored to a kind of chocolatey brown a little bit of a blue grey streaks running through it shows signs of spalting which is a fungus that gives it a lot more character so this would make a wonderful tabletop well our next piece is going to be hedge and it's not even 4 feet long so it's not going to go across the cost bunks so what we're going to do we put some boards down to support it and we've got a backing board here to hold it and hopefully it'll rest here long enough for me to slice it up so that's just one of the texts you learn when you're doing with this oddball stuff there there's always a way to cut it you just have to stop and think about what you're doing and I got that position so the flattest side is dance it's pretty stable but I'm also not if I can get this clamp on it and I'll help lock it down too this dose a joint and it is one of the hardest woods to deal with that I've ever cut and that starts with cutting down the tree because it has thorns enix and if you find the right woodworker they will absolutely fall in love with a slab like this just have to find the right woodwork I think I'll save this last piece make it into a bench that'll be pretty so what we have here is an oddball piece of Sycamore it was left behind from a logging operation just a piece of junk that nobody wanted and it's a little bit over four feet long it's long enough to sit on the cross bunks but as you can see our clamps won't quite reach it I could reset the clamps and that would only take a couple of minutes but on a lot of mills you cannot move the clamps so I want to give you a quick demonstration of how I deal with short logs that will go across the bunks that won't quite catch the clamps and the way you do that is to bridge across the clamps with the board now I'll roll that log up get it positioned the way I want to and that should be enough to hold it in place for what we're doing [Music] all right so this is the piece right out of the dead center of the log we've got some knots here give it character the grain is kind of swirling around it one thing is I've got some real pretty feathered grain up here where that where it Forks off so that'll make a real pretty piece we can take two pieces book matching together to make a wide tabletop and that's really going to be something so all that just out of a scrap piece of sycamore all right so we have a total of eight slabs three of them are a nice wide ones and few of them kind of narrow like this which is still still worth cutting and probably $300 worth of lumber and about a half hours worth of work that's out of the log that was left out in the woods to rot because they'll been thought it to be worth cutting you show them they're wrong and that's what I like about running this whole sawmill is it gives me the opportunity to salvage some amazing would that otherwise would never see the light of day this is Sikkim and to give you an idea on size it measures across diameter right at 40 inches and the lakes patty feet long exist in this one log is about 620 feet on the international scale now yes 40 inches is too big to go on the sawmill I wouldn't let that stop you if you're really interested in getting some very special lumber out of your logs being Sycamore it has an incredibly beautiful quarter sawn grain to it in fact it's known in woodworking circles as American lace would ya you wanted to see an American lace wood tree doesn't exist it's not lace wood until you have done the quarter song on the Sycamore so the question is how do you get something this size on do a sawmill that can handle a maximum of 36 inch done yet [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well it's just a preview of what we've got to look forward to it looks even better when it comes off the mill because it's cutting straighter and smoothly but even so we've got [Music] well I think we got ourselves a real pretty log well it must seem like my idea of fun involves an awful lot of work well it involves effort that's for darn sure but as far as work I guess that's all in the eye of the beholder some people run marathons or otherwise have ideas and recreation that involves a lot more effort than what I put into this and they seem to enjoy it too so so whether it's milling up a sycamore log so huge that I have to quarter it with the sawmill first or something so small that I have to figure out some way to clamp it down just to get a board or two out of it I enjoy it I guess it's a challenge that I enjoy the most that and seeing what's buried inside that log nobody else knows about something else I enjoy is what you can do with the wood once you build it and dried it this is the finished product to mountain dulcimer the the back sides that are all walnut that I've cut on the sawmill and and the soundboard is sycamore which I also cut on the sawmill and I can tell you exactly what tree it came from case of the Sycamore it had been standing dead for about a year which is why we have all that spalted character to it and doesn't sound too bad [Music]

Channel: Norwood Portable Sawmills

Views: 178,277

Rating: 4.9109082 out of 5

Keywords: sawmills, Norwood, Sawmill, saw mill, portable, mobile, portable sawmill, mobile sawmill, portable saw mill, mobile saw mill, bandmill, band mill, band sawmill, mobile band sawmill, portable band sawmill, Norwood sawmills, Norwood sawmill, Norwood saw mill, wood, sawing, sawmilling, forestry, forestry equipment, forest management, WoodMizer, Wood-Mizer, Woodland, Woodland Mills, HD36, LM29, Logosol, Timberking, chainsaw sawmill, chainsaw saw mill, chainsaw, sawmill school, Hudson, saw

Id: eLbnjkjXDmw

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2018