Thread: Milling red cedar logs

Originally Posted by gordonwindeyer

A month ago a friend who lives in Sydney had a red cedar tree felled and has two one metre long sections about 12-14" diameter.
He would like to use the timber for something sometime in the future.
I thought he should have it slabbed and then carefully stored to let it season, but then thought I should get advice from the Forum.
I would appreciate your thoughts.

As they are only 1m long I would think about quartering them with a chainsaw or bandmill and then mill the 1/4s up on a regular bandsaw

Very small red cedar like that just shrinks like crazy. I would only cut them down the middle and seal the ends and then leave them for a few years before milling them on a bandsaw. The good thing is that once it has shrunk and is stable you get very concentrated richly coloured grain. We picked up one like that on the street in charlestown a few years ago.

You could just slice in half as Len says. A decent bandsaw can be used to slice it up to what ever he wanted when the time comes rather than milling it too.

12-14" is very small log size for cedar. Good colour starts at about 24" dia. This sounds like a pretty young tree so there will be a lot of sap wood which is highly suseptable to borer. Particularly Lyctus, which would be an ongoing problem throughout the drying period.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.
I haven't seen the logs, but it sounds like we shouldn't expect too much of the end product. It is also clear slabbing it now is not the go.

Thanks again

Gordon