Spruce in New Cannan

This past weekend featured a large job in New Canaan. The travel distance was 101 miles. The time was just under two hours. I’m glad Connecticut is a small state.

The NYC area was hit by a pretty nasty storm a few weeks ago, and I’ve been getting a fair number of calls from people in Fairfield county Connecticut with trees down. This family had about a dozen good sized spruce trees go down. The one pictured was the only one in their front yard. It was also the biggest.

The landscaping crew brought in to clean things up cut this trunk into 3 logs about 13’ long. I used the LogRite Fetching Arch with the tow ring and the truck to pull the logs into position. Peaveys and Cant Hooks were then enough to move the logs onto the mill’s loading arms. I was assisted in this by a couple of High School age lads.

After the first log was sawn, the boards were trucked around behind the house to a small barn where they would be stacked for drying. We worked out how the lumber stacks would be arranged, and I gave a lesson in how to build a stickered stack of lumber, and went back to sawing. We got though the 2nd an 3rd logs and then called it a day.

On Sunday, I moved the mill behind the house where most of the devastation was. The trees that had gone down back here were smaller, but there were a lot of them; all spruce.

I set up the Fetching Arch in the two-man-handle configuration, and enlisted the lads to help me move a medium sized log to where it could be rolled onto the mill. Those boys were hooked. They took to that arch like ducks to water. I felt like Tom Sawyer. Whenever someone wasn’t on their case to carry boards to the barn, they were running around grabbing logs and moving them into position.

We sawed up a bunch of logs, but there’s a bunch more left. We’ll be going back next weekend, weather permitting.

Hickory in East Haddam

I sawed for a customer, Matt, in East Haddam yesterday. He had one big Hickory log. The loading arms were just barely able to lift the log onto the mill. Hickory can be very tough, and this log did give us some problems. Matt wanted some 22 foot long timbers. Unfortunately, the maximum length my sawmill will cut is only 21 feet. This led to a lot of head-scratching as we figured out how to shift the log back and forth to get the saw all the way through the log. We got there in the end though.

The weather was perfect, 70 degrees and sunny, and Matt's property was very scenic with a white colonial house, a large red barn, and a picturesque pond. It would have been hard not to enjoy the day despite the challenges.

Matt said he’d call me back soon to saw some shorter logs.