Save That Log!

Interesting story. My friend Terry had this growing in his yard. It's a crab apple log from a crab apple tree. And when the tree had to come down, it put him in a position of like the trees always been there. We've taken pictures of ourselves and our kid under that tree. So it'd be neat to do something rather than just take this to a burn pile. So here it is. Um I love this idea. I call this heirloom wood and I think that when you can save the log and you can do what we're about to do, it's a great way to make something out of wood that otherwise would have just gone to waste. And especially when it's got some significance to you. So, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm looking at the pith of the tree on this end and right above that path, I'm gonna make a little cut because what I wanna do is make my band saw cut right in line with that path. So I'm doing that there then on the other end of the log, let me just show you. I'm gonna be eyeballing the pith there that like bull's eye right in the middle. So eyeballing, meaning there's my slot, grab a snap line. And the reason for that slot is so I can hook in it like that. And then on this end, the path I just showed you a second ago, I'm looking at that getting lined up with it and snapping a line. The deal with doing this is you want this cut, you have to make this cut parallel to the grain of the wood. If you end up on a diagonal like this, you're gonna end up with what's called short grain material. It's very weak. It's gonna be very prone to breaking. So we gotta get this first cut parallel to the grain. Now, this log has got a shape to it where it's gonna sit flat. If it was like this, then real roly poly, I would run a uh power plane over the bottom to put a flat on it so that it would sit flat because this already has that kind of a shape. We're gonna be OK. The lesson out of that is you don't want to take a completely round log and do this next step because it's too prone to rolling. And if it rolls real bad, the bandsaw blade is gonna get jammed in there. Um The other thing is uh Terry did paint the ends right away. Um This may be set, this is my fault. I let it sit just a little bit too long before doing this step. And that's why you see these checks. We'll see what it looks like once it gets inside. But the bottom line out of that is paint, the ends of the log that slows down the drying. But do this, you wanna cut it as fast as you can after the tree comes down. We're hoping that it's still pretty green inside there that it's still pretty wet wood dries way more better when it's, I mean, it um, it dries better. It handles better when it's still green. If you let it dry in log form, then that's when the cracks start to form. If you let it dry in plank form, you have much better control of the drying process. So I just gotta make sure I have enough clearance need about nine inches blade. Selection is a half inch blade with a real aggressive tooth pattern. This is a three TP I, three teeth per inch per inch blade and I'm just gonna freehand follow that snap line. There we go. I love having a break on a Banza trying to do a big reveal here. So I'm trying to be sort of secretive with these parts so that I can show you what it looks like inside. Boom. That's some cool looking stuff. The straighter you can cut on this first cut, the better everything is gonna go from here on out. The more useful your material is gonna be So what's gonna happen next is now we use the fence and I'm gonna position that where I want to make my cut. I'm going to five quarter, going to inch and a quarter. That's gonna leave us plenty of room to surface this stuff down after it dries so that we can then plane it, use it, you know, make it into the functional lumber we'd have in our shop. So next step is easy, flat face against the fence to start sawmilling this stuff out. Uh So a note the sparks you see happening are because the saw has ceramic guides on it. And that's just a by product of the blade being up against those ceramic guides every once in a while. Let's see where we're at in the Mr or, or MC world moisture content. So this is good. The fact that that's still 33% and I can feel the moisture in the wood means that it's still plenty green inside here. We want that by air drying to come down to about 12%. So, um this is good in that the log didn't sit so long that it dried all the way through. You can see we've still got plenty of useful stuff coming out of this. One of the other great by-product of doing your own cutting on your band saw is that we have all of these sequence cut pieces which creates a book, match every, every piece is book match to the previous piece. So um it's a neat by-product of having your own sequence cut material is that when this is dry, if Terry wants to, he could join that edge joint, that edge glue these together and have that perfect book match between those two parts. So instead of firewood, now there's project wood in about a year when it's dry.