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Excited to see what you turn it into! Cheers for the pics 😊

Originally Posted by bueller

Excited to see what you turn it into! Cheers for the pics 

Order is for slabs I hate the dammed things: seems like a waste of some good 12" quartersawn boards to me.

Might have to sneak in a couple of quarter sawn boards?????? Not that I am a fan of cedar, but I do like to fondle good timber...

Jim

Originally Posted by powderpost

Might have to sneak in a couple of quarter sawn boards?????? Not that I am a fan of cedar, but I do like to fondle good timber...

Jim

Cedar doesn't do much for me either Jim. I've seen plenty of good cedar too, and even a few really good bits, but I just can't find the love for it that I can for some other species. (Well except for the bank account, I can feel the love for the stuff there when it happens).
I dont think its an overrated timber by any means... its more a case of theres timbers I like a whole lot more that are vastly under rated. Of the "big four" rainforest primaries - NSO, QMP, Cedar and Black Nut the only one I got a love for is the Walnut and its a bitch to do anything with from start to finish.
My favourites are actually Silver Silkwood, Silver Quandong, Pencil Cedar and Red Wattle... nice to mill, nice to work... and as much chance of stunning as any of the big names.

Yeah as much as I like seeing the figuring in slabs the stuff they're turned into usually doesn't really do it for me.

Then again one of the things I like most about woodworking is joinery so hardly surprising really!

Anyho... it wasn't fun. What should have been a pretty easy 1/2 day job turned into a most of the day battle. I hate slabs and I dont normally cut them but this was a job for a mate so whats a man to do? Dust the Lucas slabber off but it was all out of alignment so it took me the best part of two hours of playing about before I was happy with how it was cutting. Just in time for it to get hot for the day.

And the log had nails. Probably related to the length of old clothes line hanging out of one side.
Lots of nails. All through the dammed thing. I'd say every time the tree outgrew the old clothes line they hung another one off it with a few more nails to hold her up.
Yard trees - gotta love them. Little nails though - not like the time I tried to fell a tree and it had a truck leaf spring grown into it.

Also had a pocket of rot down one side out of the fork. Couple of 1/2 slabs came out of it on that side. Thats sort of par for the course around here now: I suspect it'll be another 40 years before we get away from trees with top down rot from torn off branches going bad. Thats what happens when you get two category 5 cyclones in ten years I guess.

And then to top the day off I accidentally deleted the pictures i'd taken. Because there were some really nice figured boards in there on the "good side" of him. But I went back today to carve some legs out of the bigger branches so I grabbed a couple of the stack. He cut alright overall... just a shame about the three slabs that are only half there due to rot, plus a couple have pith and associated cracks down the guts of them. Even with the bad day at the office and some chain now totally destroyed it was still a cost effective exercise: there's some good sized slabs there and a couple of them have got nice figure, and even the bad ones will either give at least 2.4 in length or the ones with pith will still recover 400+ x 62 boards either side.

All in all I thought I'd had a pretty ordinary day... but after seeing Greg Ward's post I aint going to complain.

Ah, the constant whine of the saw mill. Or is it the miller?