- Hello everyone. Welcome back. Today we're gonna be sawing some boards. I have a bunch of small stuff
that I want to get cut up so it'll be cutting mostly edged four quarter today on the sawmill. So it's absolutely beautiful today, we have some unseasonably
warm weather this week. It's like almost 80 degrees at the beginning of April. Last week was like maybe it got to like 40 or something. So definitely like feels like a summer day even though it's not anywhere
near summer quite yet. And the snow has finally just melted. And what happens when that happens is you find all the
things you forgot about to deal with last year and they stare right in the face. So I have all these small logs and a bunch of off cuts
that I was gonna cut more pieces out of that are staring me in the face that I need to go bye bye. So let's get set up here. We're gonna need the, where this is the telescopic
altering forklift thingy. We're gonna need the Matt sized skid steer and we're probably gonna want the, you know the sawmill. That'll probably come in handy. (engine rumbling) Okay, so let's go take a look
and see what we have for logs. So the log pile is kind of a disaster. I shuffled through here last fall to pull up the logs we cut
last fall for those videos. And this has been covered in snow for a long time now. So it's been, it's been hiding how bad all this this really is. So I have a couple of
small walnut logs down here and then on the other side of the log yard I have these smaller cherry logs here. I also have all of the, the cap pieces. The first off cuts from a bunch of logs. Normally I set them to the aside so I can cut them into you
know four quarter boards when I'm doing four quarter. So now is what I'm doing four quarter, so we'll see if we can get
out of the pile of junk that's lying around. Part of this is just getting this place cleaned up a little bit and you know, catching up on all of that. So I have all of these off
cuts here from last fall that we can kind of go through and get some salvage stuff out of. But first we'll grab the new logs and start getting those turned into cants. (engine rumbling) (blade sawing) (wood creaking) (blade sawing) (metal clanging) (blade sawing) (engine rumbling) There is our first cants and again, usually when I cut four quarter I'll make a few cants and then since the saw
has so much capacity, I just put all the cants on the bed and I can do all the slices at once instead of turning 'em all in a cant,
slice 'em all individually just it feels like a better
workflow for me at least. So I haven't shared this yet,
where these logs came from. So the first two here
these are both walnut that came from Cedar Rapids, they were in the back of the
grapple truck to help us load that massive cherry onto Josh's trailer. And I guess my trailer too, since I did haul back some of the pieces, this thing was sitting
in the back of the truck during the pickup and we just chopped it in
half when we were leaving. It was otherwise I thing it's gonna be firewood or something. So BJ just gave it to
us to use for something and now it's getting sawn into some stuff. This cherry back here did
a video I'm picking up about a year ago. This was from a local viewer
who had a cherry tree removed, just a really quick pickup. I went with the skid steer in the trailer, picked all the logs from
the side of the road and brought them back here. Just a fun little, a little day trip adventure thing. And those been sitting for a year already. It goes crazy fast. So this next one I'm gonna put on and I don't think I'm
actually gonna cut this into edged lumber because it has this really
cool like bend in it up here. So if I do cut it into edged lumber, I'm gonna lose a lot of material. Just trying to get something
straight out of this. You can see like S curves through there. So I'm gonna saw it
with this S curve in it. I think they could make
for some interesting grain and shapes and patterns if you wanna lay out some curved pieces, you have curved grain that you can use. So just, just for the sake of setting the decision
making onto the future, whatever that is, future-proofing, no delayed decision making. (chuckling) I'm just gonna saw this
into live edge four quarter. So that one's gonna go on next. We'll face off one face I guess and then throw it in the pile and move on to the cherry. (engine rumbling) (blade sawing) (engine rumbling) (blade sawing) (metal clanking) (blade sawing) (engine rumbling) (blade sawing) This one's got this kind
of weird little like abrupt curve right here. So I'm cutting it and ignoring
this little section of it. If you want to make this a little better, we could lift that end up or whatever. But I'm basically just lining up from here down getting that level. And this is whatever ends up being it's got some weird
damage thing down there. So I'm not, I'm not that worried about that end of it. This part in the middle is, or the whatever is one, two, two, four, six, eight. This first seven feet is good. (blade sawing) (metal clanging) (blade sawing) I wanna take a moment to kinda explain what I'm doing with the the edging. So this face and the face
on the bottom right now are gonna be the edged faces. So those are gonna be
the edges of the boards. So you can see it's pretty conservative. I'm kind of hit and missing in a bunch of different places and I'm sawing fairly conservatively to basically make as wide
of boards as possible so I can have whatever I need in the future, I can get more width out of it or I can get some kind of curve
with the grain or something. And then this face here is gonna be my sawing plain. So the boards be sliced this way is gonna be the widest ones. And again, I'm a little
conservative as well here just to get as much yield as
I can, you know, for whatever. So this one will be flipped up and then I'll be able to
saw all my boards out of it. So little more, a little more conservative on the edging sides. And then I can go in and
actually make my cuts. With this type of sawing, we're doing four quarters. So I'm using my lumber scale again. So as I get my first board off of there I'll pick whatever number gives me the best starting point. I can make a cut at every
one of these numbers. You'll see when we got the logs on there and we'll be able to slice it
all the way down to the bed and that'll divide that log up or that cant actually up into evenly sized four quarter boards, which you can see a
piece of four quarter is more than an an inch thick. This is an inch, that's four quarter, which
is inch and an eighth plus the curve the blade
is already accounted for. So you can see the more
boards you get on here, the more deviation there is, the further you get away
from that actual one inch, 17 inches is only 14
pieces of four quarter. And that kind of leads me
to one little side thing I wanted to share about the using like the quarter scale system
to like talk about wood and why don't I always say
like it's is an inch thick or it's two inches thick. Why do I say four quarter, eight quarter. So like two kind of reasons for that. First off, at least in my mind, the industry should be
referring to rough sawn lumber as something in the quarter scale. So you know, it's actually rough sawn. And then the other thing
with the quarter scale and not saying that it's an
inch thick is because it's not. It's somewhere greater than an inch or somewhere around an inch
depending who's sawing it. In my case, inch and an
eighth by the time it dries. Depending on the cut orientation, it could be down to an inch and 16th or if it shrinks a heck of
a lot depending on species it could shrink down to an inch as well. So four quarter to me or like using any kind of quarter notation just to note that it's rough sawn and it's gonna be rough
sawn at the sawmill greater than the actual, you
know fractional thickness if you divide out the numbers. So this, that's just me at least. I know some people don't like using that, the quarter scale for stuff but I don't know, I think it makes sense, at least to me in my weird mind. Okay, let's, what are we doing next? We're gonna kick this one off the saw and sea bolt the next one. (engine rumbling) Okay, this one's got some
kind of crazy curve to it and it also tapers quite a bit right around here. It goes from this large diameter to the smaller diameter and that's kind of where
the curve kind of is. I mean, I don't know,
probably back a little further is where the curve actually starts. But I think I'm gonna do is come in here and just chop this down right here, right above this, this limb and they'll give me a narrow diameter log and then a bigger diameter log and I'll process those individually. I may just leave them as live edge or I may square them up. I don't really know yet, but I'm gonna grab a chain saw. (saw rumbling) (blade sawing) Okay 'cause I'm feeling kinda lazy and these are super goofy shapes, I'm gonna leave them as live edge. So let's load up the
bed with all these cants and start slicing them up. (engine rumbling) So I'm stepping down the scale. I'm at 15 four quarter boards now. I should only, I'll probably skim this
big one to get started. And you see as we get down the scale we'll
eventually start edging and getting rid of all
of the pieces of bark. All right, here we go. (blade sawing) Okay, last cut, here we go. (blade sawing) Those are all sliced up and ready to go. I am going to stack them in place over one of the horse shelters. So I'm not sure if I wanna stack these now or start sawing up some
of the small stuff. But regardless they gotta get off the saw and outta the way. So yeah, I mean I'll do that. Maybe I'll stick these aside for now and then we'll cut up
some of that small stuff. (engine rumbling) (blade sawing) (engine rumbling) (blade sawing) (engine rumbling) Okay, there is our pile of
stuff that needs to be stacked. We have all the small logs that we're sawn and then all this reclaimed stuff here from those waste pieces. And who knows with this stuff,
some of it's kind of iffy. Best case it'll get
used for small projects. Worst case I'll turn into stickers and use 'em for that. You can always use more stickers And then this is the pile of actual waste, which I'll get rid of. And maybe, I might edge some of this. I don't really know. I'm more concerned about
getting that stuff stacked now. So think we'll start getting these stacked and we'll take a look at the wood 'cause even I haven't seen anything yet. (engine rumbling) So last fall I cleared
out this horse shelter. I had these three stacks
and they're pretty much all the way up to the rafters there. I cleared those out to have them dried. So now these are all open and available. I'm gonna stack these, this load of four quarter
on this first row here since I have the wider base. And then later on when it's dryer, I have a bunch of slabs and stuff that I will stack kind of back there. This little horse shelter thing has been working out pretty
nicely for air drying stuff. So yeah, I don't know, maybe I'll start digging through here and get my first few rows established and we'll go from there I guess. (wood banging) Okay, let's take a look with some water. You can see just how
wet this stuff still is even after being, you
know, sitting around for like two years now, just to get an idea here, like ah we got some spalting
in the sap, which is cool. Heartwood is just purely
like clear and clean. That actually is a nice little log. Those boards are quite a
bit wider than I thought. They're pretty close to 12 inches wide. Very clear here. We got a few fun little knots and bits of figure here and there. But overall just some really clear and I don't know, chocolatey walnut, you can see how much is oxidized already just sitting around. (engine rumbling) That's a nice piece of wood. That's big. Why does it always look bigger after they're cut? I don't get it. That log does not look that big. Let's see if I can get
three of 'em on here. I'm kind of like mushrooming out. Oh this is gorgeous. It's get some crotch figure in the middle. Ooh, that's a big board. Wow. That's quite large Look at that. It's a nice figure. We got some really nice color in there. That's not bad. That is not bad. That's some big piece of wood though. (chuckling) Like a lot bigger than I thought. Actually here's, here's
some more figure right here. Look how wide these things are. (water splashing) That's, that's a lot of board. I think these are like 16, 16 inches wide or so, something like that. It's absolutely bananas
how big these boards are. And fairly clear, that's, that's a lot of wood. (chuckling) That's, this is like what 32, 35 board feet in this one layer, three boards. (chuckling) We still got more and this log looked a lot smaller. (engine rumbling) So once again the, these curvy walnut boards
are quite a bit bigger than the logs seem out in the yard. These are like 16 inches wide or something and they got this nice fun
graceful curve in there. So that's, that's gonna make some nice
curved furniture parts. One thing I'm doing here, you can see I got like the center boards which are the widest
and through these layers I'm sticking on some of the outside boards 'cause they're narrower. So you, you kind of have to like mix up the stack a little bit to make this all kind of work. But we're gonna take a quick
look at these guys 'cause this situation here in the
middle looks very promising. (water splashing) Yep. So we have some fun crotch
figure here in the middle which is pretty darn nice. And then the rest is basically clear. There's a few, you know, kind of small knot things here and there, but for the most part we got
some nice wide clear walnut especially down here at the base. Completely clear up until
this knot right here. So that's some nice stuff. That's some, that's some really
nice stuff, that's for sure. So I have two more boards or
slabs, whatever for this log and then I'm onto the, those
short cherry logs after that. And then after that it's
all the salvage stuff from the waste wood. So now we're onto the, the two shorter logs that
have 'em stacked up here. We got some pretty fun
crotch figure and stuff. So let's see what we got
going on with these guys. (water splashing) This stuff is pretty nice and
rich as far as color goes. This one's got this bark
conclusion thing going on here and then the, these are so much bigger like now than they were like in log form, it looks like every
time I see these things, this looks so much bigger. This is a little over 12 inches wide but we got some nice kind of grain and some kind of crotch
stuff going on here. Yeah, this a little crotch figure here from this little limb right there. So definitely some good
stuff in these guys. And those are, I think
those are four footers or something like that. But now I'm onto all the junk stuff. (chuckling) The other downside of hey just keep sawing random little pieces of wood
off logs to get more yield. Now you pay for it when you
gotta stack all this crap. And that's, that's when
you gotta ask yourself is it really worth it to
actually saw these things into a bunch of shorts
and random length pieces or is it better just to
toss 'em in the burn pile? (chuckling) We're gonna give it a try. So there hasn't been anything too crazy but I thought this was pretty interesting and exciting I guess
as far as figure goes. For some reason, that one's got all kinds of like oh curling and stuff in there. So is this one, so this log would've been the test in the sawmill bed extensions. So I believe this section
here on the tree we saw when I cut it was curly and stuff. So we got some more
little fun bits of figure that we established from the crap pile. And then I just have a few
more boards to throw up there and then I'm done stacking. (saw slicing) (engine rumbling) (wood crashing) (engine rumbling) So that one didn't really want to go. Maybe I'll try and stick
it up top there later but at least this stack is
kind of done and outta the way. I think I have about 700 board feet here. We got maybe 30 something
board feet per layer and there are 26 layers. Plus I got some eight
quarter stuff up top here. So probably about, I
dunno, six, 700 board feet, something like that. Pretty good amount for, you
know, some smallish logs and then this is all the bonus stuff from the off offcuts and everything. Not too, not too shabby. So this was kind of nice just to get out, clean up a little bit, get rid of some of the small stuff, get it sawn and get it drying so it's, you know closer
to it's final use. So hopefully enjoyed a look at cutting up some smaller stuff. The hot air balloons are
out and the deer out. So thank you as always for watching. I greatly appreciate if you
have any questions or comments on sawing smaller logs
or crap into boards, please feel freely make comment. As always, I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have. Until next time, happy woodworking.
