Turning a tree into lumber using a homemade Alaskan Mill

what I'm going to do here is I need to shift this log roll it so that the heart cracks on both sides are level yeah see this is the heart crack through here generally most logs will have heart crack and I want to cut that I'll just make a mark so you can see it easily yeah I want to be able to cut that out when I start cutting slabs so both sides have that heart crack lined up level I can't roll it this way because I'd be going uphill so you'll be rolling it until it's vertical or until it's all real quite a ways to go mmm so this log is about two and a half feet diameter 30 inches and it's a eight-foot log well probably nine for you I usually cut about a foot extra so this is how the pyramids were built and rocks were moved yeah but a big piece of machinery would move pretty easy but just me yeah if highways Wow so the heart cracks one in each end they're both slightly different to each other with the casting they play twists the log twisted wood it grew probably yeah so you're kind of find the average I'm finding the average basically I want two four inch thick slabs under this to make a big bench and so fortunately the heart's way down here so I'll probably get my two slabs here easily okay the sides off with my chainsaw because I don't need to do all the milling with my Alaskan mill with that because this is all gonna be exterior so I don't want any SAP wood if it was gonna be interior I would rip the whole thing because then you get all that width but the SAP wood really rots quickly outside so you'll cut the outside off and turn it into firewood yeah just like here just like that very cool okay I should be able to see enough of that now that it's not look at a straight line how often do you have to sharpen the saw well as long as you don't hit during anything with this kind of work not too often probably every year just four or five times I mean cut yeah it's just so that if the teeth are pretty equally cut and the same angles and sharp the saw doesn't start veering to one side it'll make a cut just pretty straight another advantage ripping the sides off or peeling the bark off yes when you go to use your Alaskan mill it's a lot easier to cut because the bark really clogs up even where your cut is so I won't have any bark on this when I go to make my gonna be really clean you have your foot under there when you're cutting down that bar is going through can you see it yeah yeah cut the end your foot off you gotta really watch it yeah when you're doing this kind of stuff yeah sure it's happened before good they okay looks good so what I'm doing is I'm taking the bark up because I want to set my rail to set up my Alaskan male you don't have to do that but it makes it a lot easier just set that just set it up yeah and de nailed it on cuz you got to nail it onto the log yes so harder through the bark so what exactly is this bar um using is what the bar this is just a bar that's older than I am I got it from my father that's probably 70 80 years old uh-huh this is for its uh originally I think was used for setting best put fence post so you put your post in and then you tamp it down like that around the post multi-functional oh yeah I must have yeah I use it leverage yeah it's just great for leverage I couldn't move his log otherwise yeah that makes it peel off like a butter the logs been sitting here for months sometimes it gets a little easier to take off okay what I'm doing now is I'm putting this rail that I've made it's straight and each side is parallel to each side on the rail so if I get this set up correctly I'll cut a even slab off of the blog with my mill so what comes into play now are the lines I've made because that means that I can measure down to this level line that I created earlier on each side of my guide here then on each side over there and then I'll be able to cut down to the line with my Alaskan meal so this you call this a board what do you call this as my guide you guys did you make you use this for all your jobs have you made it for this job oh I use this for all of my milling jobs I made this a number of years ago I have another piece that goes on to it and I can cut 25 feet long so this is twelve and a half inches on this side and I have 12 and 3/8 on this side so and shim it up a little and try to get that twelve and a half so after I get it all Eve equal on each side I'll nail it to the log so on this side you're also bringing it to 12 and a half inches right yeah twelve and a half inches to the line from the top of the board on each side of my guide and each side of the each side of the log so now I'm at 12 and a half here and twelve and F here now I have to check the other side because I pivoted it may have changed mm-hmm twelve and a half inches from the top of the guide in all four positions on both sides of the log so now I'll nail it down and I can use my Alaskan mill great so when you nail it down are you nailing through those shims on purpose through the sham so they stay in place because the Alaskan mill really vibrates a lot and in my brain out so the nail goes through the guide through the shin and into the log you just feel make sure it's dirty so you had holes there in the guide before so you kind of use the same holes over over and over sometimes it just depends on where I'm nailing it doesn't matter yeah okay now the one thing I nail the other side AII it just to make sure it's parallel and that's the advantage of having these two two sides mm-hmm and they're very close to parallel I could read this maybe a sixteenth of an inch so if you want a flat slab like how are you determining whether it's completely parallel in Flash well I'm eyeing this edge get backing up and eyeing this edge and see that it meets that edge so it's not tweaked to is not tweaked in any way right and I'm just trying to raise this one edge about sixteenth of an inch right now I have the two sides parallel now great and if this was a longer log if it was say a 12 or 13-footer over put shingles in the center here then I'd nail it there too but this doesn't have any give in this short distance okay I only need two sets of shingles and nails to keep it accurate enough yeah okay the part where I was measuring the 12 and a half inches from the top of the guide yeah on this nailed to the log yeah because now what I want to do is I want to add up twelve and a half inches here before I put that top board on well first of all let's this is the Alaskan mill this is Alaska mill you can buy setups that are aluminum got bars that an adjustable but they get a bit pricey and you can make your own pretty easy yeah this is my Husqvarna that has a 42 inch bar on it I drilled two holes in it and put in a ready rod bolt folded and stays in place pulled it on both sides with what lock washers and then you just drill this so counter drill it so that it sits on the bar its depth thing stuff to like a step yeah so now I have all these different size blocks and I need to add up to twelve and a half inches so I'm at and I need two and a half more inches so I should have okay there's 12 and a half so I'll just repeat that on this side so is it a particularly strong saw well it's a good table it's an old so I've had it for over 20 years mm-hmm and it's held up really well it's a big saw yeah so this is what an Alaskan mill is it's not like a it's a chainsaw with a set up on this chainsaw with a set up on it sometimes you have two chainsaws one on each side just depends on how how big a cut you're making and how big your saws are you don't have to have this big ax saw you can have a smaller saw you're just gonna be cutting smaller pieces of wood is all that will cut right down through that line that I have on the log I used to use just a 2 by 12 for my guide this works a lot better but a 2 by 12 will work this is about how much well this is an age structure Hou sees a plain bored playing to the instruction structures this is like a beam structure so it's a lot stronger so when I go ahead and make this cut I use a gas mask along with iron ear protection because I'm sitting right next to that motor and the fumes come right up at me and they're pretty toxic so it's a good idea to protect yourself from it yeah why more so than with a regular chainsaw well when I'm cutting with the regular saw my head's quite a ways away from the saw head and there's a breeze going through and so the wind is really taking it off I'm not getting it but with this you're really sitting right in there with it okay so now with the set up I have this board will run down the top of this now I'll be cutting right along this line and it should meet on the other side where the line is - no yeah this cuz everything is parallel and I did it with a level no and that's why I needed to shift the log so that the heart crack I was cutting out was the level tooth and then to this board for the ride along the top of that board yes while you're sewing and the bar will will cut right through that line so we'll see if it does yeah okay okay when I first put the board on I put it on backwards and there's a reason that I have it longer on this side just for safety I like to have the board go past the end of the bar it's too easy for someone else to walk up and walk into that bar when it's when the chains running and get cut really badly so right now we're looking at how it's going to be while you're cutting right and so if somebody walks up they're gonna get to the board before they get to the the chain moving because that'll cut through you pretty fast yeah okay well I'll get the chain saw started now so just hangs on bouncing on the wood nice come out in the line yeah good very impressive okay so now I'll remove the nails and then we can cut from the surface that I created we don't need this anymore I like how you put the shims in that makes sense they're as thick as the as the blade yeah if you don't put the shims in it drops down on the bar then you're cutting width and it'll bind your chain what you're gonna make out of this big block of wood on my pond where I have the koi I'm going to take two slabs and make a circular bench area break your foot I can't live something like this how happy to think the top slices what's that how heavy is the top slice gonna stop sighs I would have to guess just 500 pounds I mean this is Greenwood yeah it would probably break your foot or break your leg yeah so you lever it off oh yeah I can't lift it so now I'm going to go for cutting a 4 inch slab and so now I just change my block setting to 4 inches perfect and they should both be the same yeah so we got 4 inches now so you have to be pretty handy to want to do this to be able to do this oh yeah it's quite a bit of work for everyone it's not for everybody but on another hand where can you go buy a 21 inch 4 inch slab that's 8 P or 9 feet long of Redwood that's all hard to cut a bench out of yeah these logs over here actually I'm just gonna be cutting into material like the two by they're in stump or by because I'm going to be replacing a dècadence 20 years old so that you could just go out and buy all right I've got the material here for big slabs so it just makes sense to use it because I had to take the trees down anyway so a lot of your house you would have made the boards actually no I fell the trees but I had a mobile dimension milk up ah that would be just too much to do yeah that's uh I had a twenty seven thousand board feet of material cut up so that was like a look like a lumber yard I wouldn't be able to do yeah the most I've cut off it any one time is about 3,000 feet that's a lot of work okay now I can cut off of this flat surface that I've created for my next 4-inch slab so you don't need your border you don't need the board you only need it the first time for the guide for the first guide yeah because now I can you look at this it's a really nice flat surface I mean it's really nice straight and flat super plain yeah so you wouldn't use these shingles until you're actually working along you just place them ahead of you yeah yeah just get them in place mmm mmm mmm mmm pretty good it's quite dangerous there I mean you're using your your foot it could be you have to be very very aware of what you're doing well it helps push it down there because you are actually pushing it and it's kind of hard to reach over and push with your arms the whole day I know yeah your legs a lot stronger yeah okay we got a slab beautiful so I'll take it off and put it on some stickers they're parallel with each other and so that it dries fairly flat oh nice board nice board huh ready for another chicken ass and then I should miss C on both sides wow it's sure looking different around here cutting these logs there's just a little bit more to cut but some of my piles are very close to where the log is so I'm gonna be moving this wood to another location and then I'll finish cutting up that one log there ah sorry it's only about a foot away from your stack of wood right I need quite a bit of room for the saw because the blade extends you know a couple feet so maybe you've got like 30 or 40 boards here since we were last with you oh yeah yeah I cut up this time in a combination of two by and four by I just cut up according to what my usage is going to be yes so I have to replace a deck and so I'll need some 4 by material and then a lot of 2 by so that's how I decided to cut this time so on top of the pile there's like a thinner board yeah what I do often is I cut out the center where the heart goes through because often there'll be a crack through that and it makes the wood not usable so I'll cut like I cut just an inch out here and it's just not a very usable it's not reusable so I just cut that out because I don't want that crack to go into the next piece like this was the next piece uncut and it's a floor boy and I don't want that crack going into it so then I just use it as the cover board I see there's a little crack there in the end yeah crack here you can see it a little more clearly these are a couple more that I'm not you seeing right now cover boards but see this crack mm-hmm see it goes diagonally vertically in some areas and kind of diagonally oh yeah making the wood pretty useless in that area yeah except for a cover board yeah cover board good and I might you recover a little bit of the wood but not much yeah then sometimes you notice that one's even it's one inch everywhere this one goes from about two inches to one inch yeah sometimes the crack that goes through the heart which is typical in most trees you'll get that mm-hmm it doesn't it's not going parallel with my cuts the way I laid out the log it twists it'll twist as it moves through and this one twisted a bit so there was more waste on one side so what I do is I just used my guide again that I have right here when I get down to the heart crack and I set it up on it and then I can cut out a shape that I take more out on one side than the other so I don't get that heart crack into the next piece of wood into your primary boards that you're cutting right so now these cover boards will you be able to use them later or like what happens to them with like how many months will you leave these wood piles stats to season it just depends on what the usage is uh-huh the deck I'll probably use it in a couple months mm-hmm it'll dry some it's not essential that it dries mm-hmm because when you go to the lumberyard and buy redwood to build a deck it's wet mm-hmm it just depends on the usage right the one thing about the cover board though is it does help keep the top piece out of the Sun because the Sun does make it crack more quickly and more more quickly until it's dried to some extent so you leave these board these stacks of wood summer on your property out in the weather for a number of months oh yeah with your hoverboard yeah yeah see what happens is if if this is exposed to the Sun before it dries to some extent yeah this top part will dry before this bottom part too quickly one dry evenly mm-hmm and so that that means that part of the piece of wood is bigger than the other part and so then it starts doing all sorts of weird things because it's not dry drawing evenly yeah great yeah so anyway this is the project almost completed now almost completed and ready for me to just so these remaining pieces with lots of bark on them they can become firewood yeah all the rest of the material that I've left that I've cut from already will become firewood just as I have stacked between the trees and this is the one log here that's very close to the pile so you'll shift the pile of wood and I just don't want to double have to double move it so I'll move the pile of wood where it's gonna go and then I'll finish well it sure is interesting yeah it's an interesting way to produce your own wood if you have it you know the trees on your property and you need to take them down yeah yeah not not easy work no not easy work but then on the other hand you either are going to go to work and earn the money yeah to buy the wood or you or you do this and you have the wood you just get all the in-between stuff wonderful yeah yeah very cool great thanks sure you bet go mill your own wood

Channel: David Groth

Views: 6,957,347

Rating: 4.6819048 out of 5

Keywords: Wood, Tree (Literature Subject), Lumber (Industry), Chainsaw Mill, Milling wood, Chainsaw (Product Category), Alaskan Mill, redwood, redwood slab

Id: VAIs8VLFbls

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Bloiping]

That wood does look really nice

[u/FireappleRed]

That woman is really getting off on this. uhhhhhhhhh uhh huhhh riiiiiuhhhh ahhhhhhhh ohhhhhhh

[u/Ebola_Burrito]

Good video. The guy was pretty informative and interesting to listen to. Would of greatly preferred a stationary camera with him explaining rather than the other person asking questions.

9/10 if it was just him.

5/10 because of the additional person and moving camera.

[u/lurknomore2]

In Australia, people will call that bar a crowbar. What Americans call a crowbar, we call a wrecking bar.

[u/ActionJesus]

The camerawoman sounds so unwillingly interested in what is happening, almost like she's watching a child build something.

[u/icebiker]

Why does he not seal the ends, or did I miss this? I've only done a tiny bit of home milling, but I was told to seal the ends to prevent further cracks.

[u/spazzpp2]

looks like he's wasting a lot.