The most steel I've ever cut through - Slabbing a Big Silver Maple

hey everyone my name is Matt welcome to my backyard this time we slobbing up this big guy right here with my bandsaw mill that I built and designed right here in my driveway if you didn't see it already I did a video on going out and picking up this large log and getting it onto my trailer bring it back here and then getting it onto the mill so if you haven't seen that already I'll leave a link to that down in the description below and up in the cards so as always we'll take a look around the log a little bit see what kind of what we're dealing with and then we'll get into the actual sawing process just a little bit about the size of this thing it is close to four feet wide down here it's about 46 inches at the butt it tapers to about 42 in the middle here and then goes back up to right around 4 feet up here at the 5 crotches yeah 5 that should be pretty exciting so taking a quick walk around the log as we get up through here we can start seeing some of these crotches we have basically two pairs of Y's and then an accessory limb I guess you can call it so we have pair of crotches here pair crotches here and it's extra guy right there walk around this side so the cut orientation on this is I guess interesting in a sense because it could really be either this way or turn 9 degrees from here cutting it this way so we're cutting through here for instance 9 degrees from what it is right now we would have these two crotches coming together through all of this furrowed area through here which would produce some pretty interesting things but it would have this kind of odd shape where the slab itself would have X material up here and then be shorter down here so it wouldn't be as practical as the way that's oriented right now at least in my opinion so I'm looking at it from above you can see we still have a crotch kind of orientation here with these two larger limbs and they'll come together through here and this will give us a more I guess uniform shapes the slab where it has you know an actual end point as opposed to cutting the other way you would have a long section and then the slab would kind of start again over here yeah turn around here goes I have this old limb here which might produce something interesting as well but you can see as well how the we grew and a little bit of spiral so you have a little bit of spiral drain here as well which should further make things a little more interesting so what this extra loom appear that's just gonna give us a little bit of bonus I guess you might see a little bit of figure popping through at that point but overall the figure will come from a two main limbs and if you think about the crotches has to come through the two main ones will essentially get the same thing down here but we get just slightly shorter slabs so instead of a full ten feet long needs to be somewhere around maybe nine eight and a half or so and we'll still have some really nice crotch figure as a result of those limbs being there as well so that's how I've decided to slice this guy up I think it'd be beautiful either way you're gonna get some crazy interesting things if you were to cut it the other way from here from these little furrows as well and you got a lot more interesting things up here but I think coming through here will be slightly more practical which isn't something that I say super often I know a little bit on setup you can see I've raised this side of log up about two inches and I bring it more in line with the limbs that are protruding down here kind of making the log a little bit on the angle as it was sitting before so this makes the top of the cut a lot more even it'll put the cut path in line with the center of the tree so probably one of the more straightforward decision-making processes on cutting a log I don't really think he could really cut this in a way that wouldn't be that great as long as you're cutting and playing with either of the crotch directions I think they'd yield pretty awesome slabs regardless I'm just more lean towards as practicality standpoint this time so for the first cut probably gonna coming right around here which is about 40 inches off the bed that should give me a wide enough slab for that top one to go down with my foundations and give me enough contact of those so I'll go ahead and make that first cut and we'll see what we got inside of here [Applause] so I got some I got some aluminum nails I'm going to worry about those aluminum's nothing so let's uh let's try and pull off this top waste piece and see what what's inside [Music] looks like we really have a good amount of figure through here around these bar conclusions but let's take a quick quick look yeah so we're starting to see it a little bit of figure poking in through here around this bar conclusion and some more up through here which is super nice pretty clear and uneventful stuff except for this one event right here it's like either a couple of nails or maybe something else like that but yeah no problem those are steel not aluminum like the other ones for her [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] I am reasonably sure that we hit something here in this log not really sure exactly what it is but that blade was really struggling to get through this section right here it is pretty hot and I guess there's a missing tooth there so I'm thinking whatever it is I cut through it but this blade is trying to walk up so I'm gonna try and get this top slab over here get this blade out of here and get a new one on there and we'll try and continue this cut so I'm gonna go ahead and get this first slab out of the way so that I can pull this blade back out of here and put a new blade on it and try and continue with this cut a bit more I've already set up the area where this thing is gonna live over behind the shed with the other stacks so I can use my trailer and the arch to just drive it over to the stack oh yeah so there is at least some kind of spike in this one there's some kind of bolt or something so on this cut I cut through whatever that was that was probably like a lag bolt or something so I'm guessing that down on the next cut is maybe what this was holding into the tree or maybe another one of these you'll see I guess so I'm gonna start bringing them blade back in and I'm this cut you can see how I stopped after I passed through whatever I cut through here you can see the blade astern to travel up so that's why I stopped right here because that blade was drifting so we're gonna bring the blade back into about here then turn it back on since they should be through whatever I cut through back over here and that should help kind of even this back out remove this kind of dip and then we'll continue all the way straight at the cut at least that is the theory at this point so it sounded like I hit like two more things along the way but I'm gonna pull the slab out of here I'm gonna take a look and see what happened over here and if I really did hit something else I could hear the pitch in the blade kind of squeal a couple times in there so let's sound alike possibility hit something out oh yeah something big something smaller at least there's some stuff from this lock so actually I just saw these two so there are looks like there's two spikes here is one here and then so this is where I stopped before and restarted and then coming down through here there are two more so the smaller nail here which is maybe like uh I don't know 16 pennies framing now is two of those here and then these look like so much larger kinda spikes or things so let me just pull this back a little further and there's also nail up here and something else going on there woo so this surface is the estimating side of the ones on a log right now so we're gonna take a look and see how much stuff was actually cut through that this is gonna be a book match up what's up there right now so everything in this slab is what's on the surface of the log no right now radda a lot of things in here that's for sure so starting down here we have a small it's part of like a 16 pin and nail or something and there is another 16 penny there this is some kind of larger Spiker bolt just like these two here so it's three of those on a road here there is nothing exposed here yet but there is a lot of standing here so that tells me there's probably something further into a log it'll probably hit a next cut this is a looks like almost the side of a u-bolt head or something where you have the shank here and that's the head it's pretty big whatever that is and then we go now they're kind of sixteen pinion ale here and another one there and then this is just wood down here just some wood so I wasn't paying attention so this is actually pulling the wrong way for the stack so I'm just gonna spin this thing around 180 degrees and then I can pick it up with the trailer drive it over the stack hit my head on the hook there and [Music] all right so here we are day two yesterday I got here probably like three third year so it was raining most of the day and I had wanted to get here and get started all day waiting for to stop raining now it's the next day it's quite a lot nicer out and yeah it's like 1 o'clock so I've got a couple hours and yesterday and I'll keep going and see what happens here so let's next cut I'm gonna drop down and take a three-inch thick slice which should just do kind of two things hopefully I'll get me through most of the bolts and steel and because what actually happened is I have a little bit dip right here that's going to put my material into the slab so let me get surfaced it'll surface down to the dip and you'll have the same finished thickness as the other stuff which is gonna be cut at about two and a half inches so when actually looks like is where I thought the blade was rising into the cut it was actually rising because it had dipped previously as I was trying to get through that steel or right after I got through that steel and the rising was blade just trying to write itself back on to a straight path again but anyhoo song stuff with all this fun steel in it always makes for more exciting adventure which I do certainly enjoy so I know I'll get the question as I always do is why don't I bother trying to pull the steel out or why do I even bother song these logs at all and again this is mostly for the adventure more than anything I just really really enjoy the struggle because it makes it a lot more interesting for me to be out here having fun no the reason I don't want to pull the steel out is because that damages the wood around it quite a lot even if you're able to pull something straight out you're still likely to get a good amount of damage around those fibers so I prefer to leave them in there so that if these were turn into like a tabletop for instance in the future that steel could be left embedded and be part of the story of the the tree and the slab itself and it's not a huge deal as far as the steel being in there when it comes to surfacing this material because something that's big if they're getting you to hold for a tabletop you're likely going to flatten it with their router sled and with a router so it's very easy to avoid those areas to have the steel in there so you'll surface the whole thing with the router sled a void areas and then you come back and she's a belt sander or some kind of orbital sander could bring down that area with the steel in it down flush to the rest of the slab and then you have a surface slab with some pretty sweet embedded pieces of steel in it okay so I didn't feel anything cutting through there so I don't think I hit anything the cut line looks very straight so that's a good sign so before I continue I think I'll pull the slab back and take a look or just to make sure because that blade is feeling kind of dull especially at the cutting through the metal in that last slab and it's cutting pretty slow there's some staining here but other than that let's see any signs of any metal in here so I'm gonna go ahead and guess that we are through that now I gotta flip the slab over should be very interesting all right let's take a look at this guy so I got some cool bark inclusion on the top there oh I love wood it's so beautiful so this one's starting to get into some of the interesting stuff some things on here are a little more shall we say subdued we do have some interesting figure around this knot here this is some iron staining from you know further down the slab where that nail was that spike was or whatever but some really cool figuring above here I'm starting to get into the crotch figure here a little bit of round bar conclusion so that's just gorgeous and they have some older limbs towards the top here which produce some really interesting stuff down here is all pretty well just clear just some fun interesting green patterns not a whole lot going on but as far as this basic wood goes this is it a little bit of vanilla wood with some interesting things sprinkled in here and there and just to get an idea on width down here we're added both 32 inches coming through here it's about 29 and then up through here Reverend three feet so pretty decent sized slab here maybe nice big ol ten-foot hunk desktop or something so now that I know we're at least through all that steel I'm gonna go ahead and swap out the blade for a fresh one and then make sequential cuts until bottomed out the soft throat as always and then we'll start digging through all these slabs [Applause] [Music] [Applause] yeah it definitely hits something else once again surprise it and made it through that cut but it looks like I made it pretty well out of there without wandering too much so I'm gonna pull this slab back again and see what kind of dealing with else'll wallet up the slot in the winch feed handle too so can't feed it anymore so let's forget this time another large something but I guess that was enough to put the blade on a little bit of a dive course because we have a nice big dip through here before it started to write itself out again and it's a little a little wavy through the rest of the cut but not terrible there's a pretty significant dip right here alright see what we got here water sure that's terrible see I've got this nice high spot here or that blade drifted after that bit of Steel OOP OOP there we go Oh down here at this beautiful bar conclusion that's incredible beautiful absolutely beautiful so here's a closer look at that crotch with the bar conclusion really beautiful grain around this bar conclusion you've got a little bit of fear coming up through here the same thing over here symmetrical there is the foreign steel object you got some cool figure around these knots here in the middle and then it comes back to a fairly standard simple clear straight green stuff towards the base of the tree so I guess this is day three now so I got a little bit done yesterday on this log ended up spending the rest of the afternoon doing some other stuff including fixing up my little crank handle thing and that got me some time over on the Bridgeport playing with that thing so I want to do here was just create a bigger block it was slide on to the winch and provide a little more a little bit better contact area with that piece so that it wouldn't end up getting all wobbled out again so using the Bridgeport is a lot of fun I really really enjoy it and of course I don't have a whole lot of experience with it so little projects like this where there's no like one thing that actually matters as far as precision goes just the width of the slot the length of them a huge deal the actual position inside the part doesn't really matter a whole lot but it's being able to be at the milling machine it's getting a feel for the handles how the tools should feel if they're cutting things like that I think is a super beneficial especially for someone like me that have done a whole lot of stuff on that machine so I was aiming for was just to create a slot that was ten thousand seven inch oversized for the receiver on the winch that should allow this thing to slide on and off really easily but still be precise enough or be tight enough that there isn't a whole lot of slop there so that they where will be nice and even and I guess the contact between the winch part and my handle is as big as possible instead of being a concentrated force like it was on the existing one [Music] so the block just gets welded to the the existing crank handle and now I have a much bigger contact surface to go on to the actual crank so I've got a fresh blade on the Sun now the old one that went through this cut is just wanted a little bit it still feels like a sharpen up so I'll be able to use it in the future for cutting some smaller stuff so we'll see that bleed back when we cut the walnuts on my trailer right now but for wide cuts like this I'd like to have a sharp blade on there because it's really not worth it I keep running a blade that might be a little too dull for with when the bore selves are quite valuable so hopefully this time were through all of the steel we will see I guess so that one felt pretty good didn't feel like I hit anything or had any kind of hiccups along the way so I guess we're through all of that steel mouth so I'm gonna go ahead and reposition and we'll keep cutting until I can't cut anymore and bottom out the throw sauce [Music] [Music] [Music] so that is we got your 1 2 3 4 5 6 slabs so let's start moving slabs I think with this log what I'll do is just chase the cut so I'll pull a slab off get a stack and then make another cut once they keep in mind with this log right now is the only thing holding it in position is its own weight the more slabs I removed from it the less weighs the more likely it is to move around and we don't want to move it all genius cuts are also end up with some kind of weird tapered cut we'll have to do it 20 times so it all looks like I have enough material to get maybe three more slabs out of it before I run into some partial length cuts so I was a little bit wrong it looks like there's a small nail right through here that we hit but couldn't feel it so not a problem those small things not a huge deal it's kind of funny that you can cut these small stuff like this and continue cutting so after this there's still five cuts made on this blog um for hitting that nail so blade likely didn't even feel that nail oh yeah oh there's bar conclusion this is the stuff that I like okay so down here is the standing from around that piece of nail or whatever it's a little bit down in there I think the blade pulled the chunk of it out of there but that's kind of a cool little detail here down on this end where the grain is kind of cool you got a little bit of there's a little bit of finger poking through here on the edges just some really cool just general color and stuff coming through the middle then we get up here a hole this bar conclusion has some beautiful green around it there's just some crazy stuff happening around here it was just absolutely beautiful and I Pierre were greeted with some nice scratch figure around this nut and it's just beautiful too so overall just a really cool piece of wood they're all cool I love wood so I'm heading back to the saw make another cut and then we'll pull on the slab off and it's just gonna be that process until all the cuts are made and all we love to do is move and docket slabs alright this one's gonna be pretty darn nice I've got a feeling let's see that's uh kind of missed oh no you got some really cool bar conclusion to figure around that and then the figure around the main bar conclusion the middle still there oh so just to throw some numbers around down here we're at 38 inches from here to here between the bark up through the middle is a narrow spot here I think that's about 34 and then over here as well 35 another kind of narrow spot up here 32 there so and it kind of flares back out again a 36 it's not so nice that's nice so down here on this stand things are pretty clear and clean out a whole lot of crazy stuff going on there's some interesting things here which is kind of cool a little bit of curl towards the outside like before and then down through here we've got a lot of cool stuff happening around these knots more really cool like grayish browns happening around this bar conclusion this crazy thing right here love this and a little bit of scratch figure right there butt hole I'm liking these things [Applause] yeah hit something else again there's several teeth missing 1 2 3 4 5 6 11 okay yeah whoo more stuff stuff this side what I want to do if we want to make another cut here you can see them all the way down to right here on this kind of like a low spot in here so I could end up with you know some shorter slabs from this side or I can try and come through here and make an another cut and get a piece maybe a quarter or something a little bigger than that we'll see I think what I'm doing is I'll pull off the remaining slabs getting stacked and then I can take a look and see if I'm dealing with as far as embedment objects in this lower section I can always just roll it over and then take another cow that once it's rolled over as well what I think at this point it's just gonna be a matter of getting the the slabs off the stack and onto the other stack oh I guess off the mill bed and stacked on the stack got six slabs six labs to move one two three four five six six slabs so down here we got pretty well clear Wow really nice color and stuff down here into the middle we have these older limbs right here which have a lot of nice crotch figures surrounding them so that's a nice little accent here halfway up the log and then when we get up through here we start getting these two bull's-eyes which are the two other of the large limbs coming up this way and that way so we're getting into those those are revealing some more crotch figure here in this beautiful bar conclusion there from the last bit of the two larger limbs there who is beautiful stuff all right so now we're getting into the second shorter section of the log let's see we got this time Oh so up here we've got our starting to get into the two additional crotches but we have a lot of really nice crotch here coming right down through here and a whole bunch of curl up top here just super nice in the middle we've got this kind of crazy goofy thing going on block the Sun there's a bar conclusion with some crazy green swirling all around there and old brats go old nut there's a little bit of rot there and some more a little crotch figure right through there down here nice and clean that's your clear stuff a little bit curl on the outside in the sapwood on the left on the right and then that's the whole thing and so this is this is big this is a big piece of wood so let's take a quick look the stack is getting cat off ah well that's beautiful so there is the double bullseye with some crotch figure and stuff right there got some interesting stuff happening over here this is a kind of fun little rot pocket thing a fun figure right around this little knot er that is there and yes I'm kind of like fun little dashing zuv interest down here on this end man this stuff is a large so that's five o'clock so that means it is now family time so I'm gonna head in and I'll pick up with the rest of the stacking in maybe tomorrow or the day after or something [Music] while the kids are playing the sadhus last night I was getting things staged and as I pulled back the second-to-last slab found I had run into this apparently which I never noticed so there's a little I guess that's probably like a decent sized nail but cut it at a bit of a skew angle so a good amount of material there to cut through so I guess I cut through that and then I made the last cut so let's start looking at some slabs I guess we can take a look at this last one and see what was in there first thing in the morning dumping water on slabs ain't nothing better than this oh yeah I absolutely love the color and silver maple it's got some of the nicest color variation I think of pretty much any would lease any other common woods that I saw that's pretty cool it's a really cool grey streaking down here yeah also like yellows and blues and reds and purples in the middle of there and the heartwood is just nice a little bit of rot pocket right here so I got some old limbs that fell off and died at some point and then things start getting really interesting down here where we have both those limbs and have a nice little bit of crotch figure right here in the middle of the bar conclusion and as I like the look of these bullseye type things in there that's beautiful it's a little bit of curling and stuff through here too so that sides pretty nice all right let's take a look at this next one this is cool or through the the wrought area now so now the tree is kind of healed up itself it's also solid again and there's some really nice figure around that so there's that spykor nail whatever that I hit I guess there was actually a second one because there's another one right there so there's two in this pass so much steel in the street yeah so this is this thing that is cool I like this a lot of cool color and figure there and then up here you got the double bullseye I've got a little bit of kind of figure there and yeah just overall some nice nice colors so let me pull back the next one and see what was in that one another decent-sized nail there so yeah so much stuff in this tree so I'm gonna head back to the saw and get the remaining part of the log footballer and get that ready to be cut for his last cut since this kind of a odd shaped piece almost gonna cut this extra thick and then that can become you know other smaller things in the future probably step the saw at both three and a half inches and make it cut there and I'm just going to use the blades to write on the saw the one that's missing a bunch of teeth and stuff it should be able to cut through this just fine the cut with isn't too extreme and that's to wearable cut quality on this thing since it is the top of the stack and since this would otherwise you see you know firewood or an off cut all right she's living promising in this thing so yeah that blade is a pretty well done it did not like the width up here so it build quite a bit or rows and then Dovan even though it again so that Polly it's pretty well done but I'm not super worried about it for this one because this being as thick as it is my idea for this is be this would be cut up into turning blanks anyway so I'm not too worried about cut accuracy something like this this looks like we have a little bit of figure poking through here at the bottom of this limb things a little bit more on this side as well and it's an interesting green through here and the rest is kind of this is kind of the same down here we're know this is kind of straight grain and a little more on the boring side it's a little bit of figure over there but for instance like this chunk right here is uh that's a bowl blank right there so that's what this will probably end up being so another log turned into a nice stack slabs a nice big boule this was a fun one I really enjoy personally when things don't go totally perfectly the whole time because it does make things a lot more interesting a lot more exciting and having pieces to have embedded steel inside of them just make for some more interesting things and this helps us tell the story of the tree it's a little bit more so we got that with 13 slabs here twelve of them are at about ten quarter or so all the heavy ten quarter and I have that last one there at about three and a half inches thick so that would be 14 quarter this is a quite the stack slats so I hope you enjoyed the saw milling adventure I know I did thank you as always for watching I agree ly appreciate if you've any questions or comments on this thing the sawmill anything back in the shop please feel free to leave me a comment there's always to be happy answering a question you might have and until next time happy woodworking

Channel: Matthew Cremona

Views: 737,746

Rating: 4.7581248 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodshop, furniture making, matt cremona, matthew cremona, fine woodworking, period furniture

Id: kiRt8fFSn5A

Length: 39min 17sec (2357 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Splunge-]

@15:50 “Ah! I love wood.”

[u/Paperwind0]

We need more trees