Thread: Milling small Teak Logs - Pictures fixed

It's been a while but I finally got round to do some chainsaw milling. Only small logs with the 441, a 25" bar and my small alaskan but I figure this would be about all my knees could cope with.

The logs are small (<12" diameter, ~5ft long) Malaysian Teak, donated to a my Mens Shed. My membership is mainly social but otherwise involves occasional repairing of machinery and making various things for them but I do that in my own in my own shop.

The Teak logs were were felled about 5 years ago and transported to Australia on a pallet and stored in a warehouse for most of that time so are now basically dry and quite hard. The owner of the logs donated them to the Mens Shed about 6 months ago and the Mens Shed supervisor asked me if I would break them up for the members.

The small size meant the logs were too short and narrow for my 5m long HD adjustable Unistrut log rails but too long for my short log milling rig so I made up a milling platform from some 2" thick ply, and used a 10 x 2" pine board as a guide board for the first cut. The small size of the logs meant a way of preventing the logs from rolling sideways during cutting was required and is described below.

The milled timber is quite stunning. On exposing the cut the timber colour is initially an almost green grey colour but within 30 seconds it changes to what you see here
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Here you can see the platform and the metal (Al) flower like gizmos I used to hold the log steady.
IMG_3432.jpg

The 1/8" Al discs are off cuts from another project (Al Blast gates for the Mens Shed) originally cut with a plasma cutter so have hard ragged oxidised edges that readily grab the log. The petal lines were cut with a table saw and bent upwards in one go with a hydraulic press. Bolted to the platform off centre they can be rotated to grab different sized logs and prevent them from rolling. I was surprised to see how well this works. A couple of the individual petals did bend when a log was dropped onto the platform but the petals could be easily bent back int place with pliers.

When I say milling, all I really did was cut these logs into 2" thick slabs as I did not want to turn too much of the logs into sawdust. The Mens Shed blokes that will use them can then further break them up as they see fit on a bandsaw.

I asked my assistant to make a short Video of the cutting but a few seconds into making the vid he accidentally hit the slo-mo button so instead of ~2 minutes, the vid has become 12 minutes of slo-mo. I put it up anyway because although it is a bit like watching paint dry it may still be of interest to some members, maybe newbies?



In the vid it's instructive to see how things rattle and shake and twist, you can easily see which bolts were not tightened or came loose during the cut.

If you hang in till the end of the vid, look at how the mill dives as the front mill rail loses contact with the log (I went back to using the guide rail for every cut after that) because the log is too small and there is no support between the front and rear mill rails.

Because there are only a total of 6 of these small teak logs I decided not to optimise any of my Lopro chains to suit the timber so I used the chain loop that I use on Aussie hardwood which uses a raker angle of 6.5º. I reckon I could use 7.5º on this wood which would speed up cutting although a 2 minute cut is hardly worth futzing about with.

I cut up 4 of these logs and by then my knees were starting to throb so I called it quits for the day but all being well I will go back and finish up tomorrow. There are also a few small Camphor Laurel logs to mill which will be like cutting butter after cutting the teak.

BTW the location is the Men's Shed community vegetable garden as this would then not required and sawdust clean up.