Thread: A Blue Gum Weekend

As we all know, it's nice to get out of the house for a weekend with your mates making sawdust and producing slabs. We had previously been given rights to purchase and mill a large blue gum log down south of Brisbane - the log was 10 metres long and 800mm x 600mm one end and 1200mm x 1000mm the other end. The idea was to mill the thinner end into 3.7m lengths to give us natural edge benchtops, and to cut at 2.7m the thick end for wide slabs for island or specialty benches. We then had a 900mm long block left over for cutting of legs.
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Thankfully the farmer left his tractor (with forks) on site for our use. Without it we would have not finished in 2 days, and we would have been well and truly stuffed. As it was it was still a big 2 days, separated by a great evening around the campfire knocking back a couple of coldies and some passable red vino.
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As you expect with a log this size there was a reasonable pipe up the middle, but what we didn't expect was the large termite nest halfway up. Also there were cracks at both ends which we thought might have only gone in a short way, but ended up going almost the full length. This resulted in us changing our cut for the large end which meant we had narrower slabs, but ended up with far better recovery. To get around the termite nest we cut some 8" thick slabs so that we could resaw for legs/stringers later on.
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Because the tree had been felled due to it dying off, one side of the tree was exceptionally hard and difficult to cut, while the green side was quite good. As it was we ended up sharpening the chain every 2 slabs, plus on some cuts we had 4 of us pushing on the mill. Hard work, but good results.

Some of the slabs we got.
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And the logs racked, stacked and strapped ready for transport home.
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Another good weekend saving an 8.5 tonne log from degrading into termite food, and which will hopefully grace some beautiful kitchens in around 2 years.

Cheers

Clive