Thread: How difficult to mill Spotted gum?

Jerry, that is still very young timber and would contain a lot of sap wood in relation to the true wood. This would probably yield very springy timber that would go in all directions during the drying process. As sap wood should be removed during sawing and the heart boxed out, you wont be left with much usable timber.

Ah that's a shame.... thanks

We've milled quite a few logs of Spotty about that diameter and had no problems with splitting and such. Shrinkage seemed fairly even so there wasn't much distortion. I'm not a fan of working with eucalypts but found the Spotted gum passable.
It was actually the timber we used for our club challenge one year and the blokes came up with some very nice pieces - this was my entry here.

Nice work , The $400 was well earned after the work that went into the project.

That's a phenomenal growth rate. 40cm diameter in 10 years is exceptional.

maculata is a durable timber which is attracting a lot of interest as an agroforestry/farm forestry tree. It makes good poles amongst other uses.

There's a lot of these trees planted in Melbourne's eastern suburbs as street and garden trees. When they die/fall over/get removed by an arborist some of them would make nice salvage.

Hope you get some nice wood from your piece

David

Originally Posted by jezzashea

Hi folks,

I don't know much about timber & milling and was hoping some of the experts on the forum could offer some words of wisdom

I have a 2 metre length (approx 400mm diameter) of spotted gum in the garden, from a tree which recently died and we had to have taken down. I am really keen to do something with this wood as the tree was beautiful and was in our garden for 10 years.

I've spoken to a couple of blokes about sawing it on site and one of them seemed to think that spotted gum would be likely to splinter and wouldn't be worth bothering with. Does anyone else on the forum have an opinion on this? Is it worth me getting a portable saw mill just for this amount of timber?

Any and all advice gratefully received....

Cheers, Jerry