logging on
WHEN A FRIEND OFFERS YOU FREE LOGS, THEY CAN BE REAL TREASURE
ABOUT the middle of last year the sister of a very good friend said she was selling a building block of land in Brisbane, Queensland’s capital city, and wanted a large downed tree trunk removed before sale.
The tree in question was a common species found in Brisbane backyards - a southern silky oak, grevillea robusta, Not a boat timber specifically, it can be used to great effect in furniture making. But this was a major log, cut into two halves five metres long and half a metre through. That’s a couple of tonnes of wet timber.
I won’t bother you with the cost of getting them up a narrow driveway, across town and Moreton Bay to North Stradbroke Island. It was a painless, professional job which left me only the task of re-sawing them sometime. While I’m waiting on some good quality keel hardwood, I decided to start slabbing. I got a chainsaw mill for Christmas and its junior partner, the vertical cut kit, skip tooth ripping chains and a new bar and crosscut chain. I hate blunt chainsaws.
But this first log was a doozy. It was the upper trunk to the first major fork so had several limbs lopped off and the tangential grain promised to bog down the chainsaw, which would be right at its maximum width and power capacity. The easiest thing to do was trim them back freehand, which turned out to be easier than expected. Almost square, those sections just squeezed through the 20inch bar space.
I cut three boards 60mm thick 300mm wide and 3.5m long, then a one incher, I kept the heart out of three boards and will leave the rest of the heart in the next 60mm slab. That way I can resaw those boards to cut out the heart and enjoy the prettiest grain in the true wood.
The green slabs feel like 80kg plus but that will come down by 40 per cent as they dry to about 12 per cent moisture content, then they will be good to resaw. I won’t do that for at least another three months.
Watching chainsaw milling is like watching paint dry so I won’t bore you with it. But the following 1m video shows how a well-calibrated mill and the gutsy Oleo Mac chainsaw can deliver all true slabs with smoothish kerfs, let alone a mound of sawdust for the compost barrel.
