Thursday, March 17, 2011

More Milling

Had a couple more milling sessions recently.

Some friends joined me one brisk morning for a maple crotch, an enormous and ancient red cedar stump/burl, and a short piece of maple with quilting in it. Unfortunately this day went badly and ended early, as both maples were punky/rotten/blue stained, and the cedar was too deeply fissured to yield anything decent.



Subsequently I went back and took a look at a large piece of yellow cedar that had obviously been cut down ages ago, eventually drifted ashore locally, and had lain on the beach for several months.  After a minor string of bad luck with rotten logs recently, I was a bit reluctant to go at it since it struck me as being kind of marginal. Twisted, cracked, weathered, full of sand, etc. Despite this, it contained some very promising looking sections.

While the log was indeed full of sand and incredibly tough on my chain, I wound up getting five nice slabs from it, all quarter sawn or rift sawn. While there are some cracks, I have no doubt that I will still have a lot of very fine material once it all dries.


Sometimes it does pay to take a chance!

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Some BIG Milling

Scored this big maple log last week. 9' long, 3 1/2' wide at the narrow end. Probably the widest log I have ever attempted.



Unfortunately it was totally punky, my friend and I did not get anything from it. Which was a shame as there was some beautiful quilting in some areas.

But it was a darn fun day!

We did pick up a few pieces of cherry though. 3' across, but only about 2' long, with the graft union in them, it was a flowering cherry.


The new saw was cutting well, we used the 5' bar.