Cutting Lumber from Logs

As a woodworker, I like to stay off the beaten path a little bit. And part of that includes working with species that I can't go to a hardwood supplier and get. That's one of the things I love about using my own sawmill to make lumber. You're looking at a pile here full of elm. Couple things are really cool about this. One is I can't buy elm from a hardwood supply. Two, the elm is being taken down by people who are logging in the city. It's pretty easy for me to get delivered here to my place. Three, look at cool pieces like this. This is gonna be a beautiful piece of crotch wood that'll come out of this. I could cut that into slabs for bowl turning. I could cut it into slabs for table tops. There's pretty much no limitation except my own imagination, once that's up on the sawmill about what I could get out of it. So this is the start, pile of wood like this. From this I could start to process it into really anything I want once I've got the sawmill setup. So it's just a blast to run your own sawmill. Let's have a look at what it takes to get the material up onto the mill. Let's talk about backyard saw milling. This is really cool. You can have a blast doing this. The first thing we need to talk about is handling logs. Now, don't be scared of this. You just got to be smart about how you do it. I never pick these babies up. You just can't do it. They weight a bunch, they're full of water, they're dripping wet green, so they're way too heavy to pick up. But if you're smart about it, you can roll the logs. So this is the technique I'm gonna use. Using a couple different tools here, I'm gonna roll the log all the way up the ramp onto our sawmill, and we'll be able to get this log cut into some great usable lumber. There we go. Even though that log outweighs me by a bunch, little bit of physics using these ramps, you can easily roll it up. We'll get it setup on the sawmill here, and be ready to make some cuts. I've got the log rolled up here onto the log bed. These locks are holding it in place. Now, what I can do here with the Logosol is I can elevate the log. Do that on both ends, get the log into just the right position so that it's oriented correctly, it's positioned correctly for my chainsaw cut. So this one I'm getting setup for plain sawing. Little bit more setup. We'll be ready to fire up the chainsaw, and cut planks out of this elm log. Now with that flat established, this whole log gets spun over so that flat is on the beds. That'll let us take a flat off the other side. We're well on our way to getting this material plain sawn. I've got the elevation set on the log so that I can take a flat off the top right here. We're working our way toward that perfectly square cant. And from that cant, we'll be able to cut the planks we want. So right now we're ready to make this cut, get the top of this leveled off. Now, here on this end of the cut, there's just a little bit of bark left on the outside. In the wood world, we call that wane. And I'm not too worried about that because as these boards continue to get processed, especially once they're dry and they're in the shop, there'll be plenty of opportunity to cut that off later. Leaving it on now let's me get a little bit more yield out of this log. And then we'll be ready to start cutting planks out of this cant. Now we've got a pretty square cant here. We can start taking planks out of it. So at this point, the steps are pretty easy. Raise the elevation, take off a board. Raise the elevation, take off a board. Work our way down. As we approach the pith here, we'll change the setup just a little bit. Now with this mill, what's pretty cool is that it's very easy to control the thickness of the planks that you're cutting. All I have to do is turn the crank here. Now, I just made this cut. That zeroes everything. As I turn this crank, I'm gonna count my clicks. Each click is a quarter of an inch. So five clicks, that's one and a quarter. That makes for a one inch thick plank, and allows a quarter inch for the thickness of the chainsaw bar itself. So I'll raise the other end so that we're level. And then we'll be ready to start taking planks off. We'll just have a look at some of the lumber that's coming off of this piece of elm. And this really speaks to the question of why would you want to do this. Where would you get elm for making furniture in your neck of the woods? The answer is you really can't buy it. So what's the relative price of this stuff? I don't know because I can't go to my hardwood supplier and buy elm. But I can talk to somebody who's taken trees down, and I can get woods like this that I can cut on the sawmill. When you look at these two boards, we've got a beautiful book match between these two pieces. Just an absolutely wonderful piece of crotch that we exposed here. So if I keep track of these two pieces of lumber, let them dry, when I bring them back in the shop, I'll be able to use them side by side in a project, book match these patterns back together. It's gonna be just a beautiful addition to a woodworking project. So I... This is just one of the coolest things I've ever done, cutting my own wood like this because one, you have access to species you might not otherwise have access to. You have great control over the material that you're producing. You can plain saw it, you can quarter saw it. You can cut it however you want. And you just run into surprises like this where who knew that that was in the log. But what an absolutely beautiful piece we're gonna have out of this when this is dried and ready to go. So this backyard saw milling with the Logosol is just a blast to do, and it really gives you an opportunity to be creative with your own wood supply.