sawmilling

operator's perspective

loading a log

jay

stacked

clark

michel

mckim

the blade

faerie power was out in force last weekend. through sudden downpours and sweltering afternoon heat, we transformed our log pile into stacks of beautiful timbers.

here are some pictures and a movie! i'm very happy with the timber we sawed out. the quality is very good to excellent, only one bad log. we cut all the kitchen posts, a lot of 4x6 stock for braces, a good number of 5-1/2 x 8 purlins, lots of one-inch boards for various uses, lots of 2x4s for general purpose use. since our logs were mostly 12 feet in length, we only cut one longer timber for the porch, a 6 x 12 x 14'. the remaining timbers we'll order from a local sawmill.

the sawyer, mckim mitchell, did a great job working with us. with a crew of about six on average we rolled the logs down to the mill from the top of the parking lot, got them onto the mill's lifting arms, then mckim operated the mill sawing out timbers from a list i gave him. we then offloaded the timbers into my pickup and drove them up to the kitchen site where they're now stacked. i'm guessing we got about 3500 board feet, or about 300 cubic feet of timber. your average fridge is about 20 cubit feet. i had mckim saw some of the curved logs into 4 inch slabs for naturally curved braces and i had him slab one short, large diameter log into 3" thick bench seats with natural edges. we produced an six-foot high pile of edge waste in the parking lot much of which could probably be used for projects.