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.
