Fencing in Columbia

I visited David in Columbia this weekend.  He needs to put up some horse fencing.  He's got some trees and a chainsaw, so he developed a plan to use native lumber.  He took down trees of a variety of species: oak, ash, birch, and hickory, that I recall.  He was primarily interested in 4x4's for posts and 1x6's for fence boards.

Although he had the the logs neatly arranged 'over there',  he wanted the lumber stacked 'over here', in the horse rink area.  So I set up the mill close to where the lumber stack was to be, and Dave used his small tractor to drag logs from the there to here.  He was pretty quick at it, and I rarely had to off-bear a slab or board myself. 

We started at around 9:00 AM on Saturday, working our way through the 8 foot logs we made posts out of, and starting into the 10 foot logs we were making fence boards from.  At about 4:30 PM, we came to what seemed to be a natural stopping point, so we stopped.  It might have been better if we'd worked for another hour.

The pictures above are from Saturday; a pleasant day; not too warm, a bit overcast.  Sunday, it rained.  It rained all day.  Sometimes it was a light mist, other times it was a downpour.  We worked through it regardless.

We started again at about 9:00 AM, and worked until the logs were gone, which took us until about 6:45 PM.  We were two wet and tired people by that time.  The worst of it was not standing out in the rain all day, it was that the sawdust stuck to absolutely everything; most annoyingly the mill in thick layers, and my hands in a thin permanent coating. The picture to the right shows the sawdust encrusted mill on Monday morning, just before I spent about 40 minutes hosing it off, and then another half hour cleaning the cab of my truck.

Mostly Walnut in Stamford

I took the mill to Stamford this past weekend to mill some logs for Peter.  He owns a construction company and a millwork shop.  Due to the construction company, he had equipment to move logs, which was a good thing, because some of them were rather large.  The millwork company gave him a place to use some of the lumber I cut for him.

We started out milling a few tamarack logs, which was a first for me.  Tamarack is a pine tree that looses its needles in the fall.  It saws and looks a lot like pine.

Then we moved on to some of the larger logs.  The log in the first picture measured 36 inches in diameter by 15 feet long.  36 inches is the largest diameter log that my mill is supposed to be able to handle, but that assumes the log is a perfect cylinder.  In the real world, of course, logs are never perfect cylinders, so some trimming by chainsaw was necessary in getting started with this log.  The good news is that we were able to mill this log and made a lot of very nice lumber, including a sizable stack of 24" wide boards.  The bad news was that the log was pine, not walnut as Peter had thought.

The next log was a bit smaller at 31 inches by 8 feet.  But this one was the dark walnut that Peter wanted.  We got some nice wide boards out of this log too.

After logs like those, everything else seemed like an anticlimax.  But, we continued to mill smaller, lower quality logs until all that was left in the log pile was sticks and twigs.

Yet More Oak in Higganum

This past weekend I finally wrapped up the job in Higganum.  Six days total, over 70 logs totaling over 6000 bdft by log scale.

The weather was more cooperative, without even the threat of rain.  We were being bother by bees for much of the time, but no one got stung.

We were short handed this weekend, with only three of us on Saturday and Sunday morning, with a welcome forth hand joining us on Sunday afternoon.  Beams were initially just dumped on the ground to get them off the mill, but were stacked more neatly later.  Smaller lumber went directly into Scott's trailer.

Scott says he may have another job for me in September, somewhere east of the river.