Thread: This weeks timber

You burnt this sort of stuff on you bucks night , you must have been blind drunk

Didn't drink all that much actually, I was greened out on one to many cigars. I've learnt my lesson though. One cigar, a few drinks, and check the firewood pile for gems like this!

What a great idea for a thread.

This week I "found" all these boards hidden inside some maple logs:

John those maple logs yielded some very nice timber.

...that looks like heaven to me.

Hey John.G, can I assume you didn't cut them on a 10inch table saw!?
I'd love to see your 'best' board though.

Originally Posted by Mobyturns

John those maple logs yielded some very nice timber.

mmm... I actually got 5 straight days of driving a sawmill in the stuff, instead of a billet here and a billet there between othet jobs and that's the result running down the wall. Theyre doing okay for scrappy little logs, at this point the exercise is theoretically at break even.

Originally Posted by Emit

Hey John.G, can I assume you didn't cut them on a 10inch table saw!?
I'd love to see your 'best' board though.

No best boards yet.. I've tossed the logs likely to yield them sideways for last. But they're doing okay for what they were.

i like that lump of mango of yours!!!

Originally Posted by Emit

I'd love to see your 'best' board though.

So the truth is that when you're doing any large single species run after a while they all look the same: which is to say that the "best" boards in terms of figure are horrible hairy looking things and its the plain boards you tend to note... the rest are just somewhere there in the middle and so long as the middle is reasonably consistant then all is well.

People scoff at that but... you start pulling a few thousand linear a day of 25mm x 100 and wider at rift to quarter and truely... the ones you notice are the plain ones or the ones with off colour. Sorta like cars on the highway... you notice a Ferrari and the idiots but the rest are just a blur. And its hard to compare the best board with this log from the best board from the last log because - it's gone, buried down in a pack somewhere. And truth be told they aint really even boards yet... they might be boards or they might not be boards and until they're dry and saleable who knows what you've got. There's a reason GOS is cheap, and its all to do with drying degrade.

My practice is always to run the bottom first... cut the small logs because that way if an order comes in I have the best logs left... kinda hard to cut 12 x 2's off a 450 diameter log for example. It's also helpfull because I know this place... if I've got got good cabinetry logs in the yard I'll turn away scantling jobs if necessary before they degrade too far. If I'm having to work for it because we're cutting rubbish then - I'm well aware of exactly when a log is unviable and i'm not afraid to burn it even if it is a "valuable" species. Unviable shifts upwards somewhat when I've got jobs that generate immediate cashflow on hand.

And at the tail theres always the fun stuff... overmature/damaged/ twisted logs that are going to be time comsuming problem children. So on the tail of this run which ended up after 3 months off and on of being close on 90 cube of maple (cause y'know... you cut a few today and tomorrow but next week the heap has magically grown by another jinker) we get down to three.
Largish.
Bent.
Visible decay.
All the hallmarks of slow cutters that are going to chew time, and need a very flexible approach. ie we'll get what they give us and thats how it is. And they laid around until a slow day and... this afternoon... was playday.

Yield ... mid 20's or so after degrade... if I'm lucky. Wandering heart... incipient decay... one side half rotted out...
SDR time... take what we can get that should hold together and rip them down later if they don't. Make an awfull lot of pen blanks
2 1/2" x out to 20 where possible. And most of them did it or went close. With much swearing and cursing. They just look narrow because of the length...narrowest one was 450mm. Plus a heap of shorts of course.


Worth it???
Ask me next year when they clear the kiln.

One down - two to go.

Thanks for following up John! Those slabs look like they'll produce something nice, hopefully dollars in the pocket and an island villa for retirement.

John, some good points from a pro - I think most folks who have never sawn their own wood from logs have a very romanticised view of yield! Even after you've chucked away the initial 40% or more of waste, there is an anxious wait to see how much degrade is going to happen. The worst of it is it's so damned unpedictable, even with species you are familiar with, and wood that normally behaves well can spring surprises on you, and often on the 'best' boards...

Getting back to the original theme of the thread: A year or two back, I cut up an old log for MIL's fireplace. It had been lying in a pile of dead wood for very long time, had quite a few deep splits from drying in the round, and a rotten centre. Apart from noting that it was darker than usual for the local wattles, I didn't think anything more of it at the time, deciding wasn't worth the effort to try & save any turning bits. Some months later, I was splitting the load, which was mostly Ironbark & some old Blackbutt. I picked up a slightly lighter block & whacked it down the middle and as the two bits fell off the block, I saw the streaky colour & the glint of beautiful, fine fiddleback! So I kept my eyes peeled for the remaining blocks & ended up with most of them making a return trip to my 'woodpile'. So far, I've made a couple of saw handles, a bowsaw & 4 or 5 marking gauges, and there are still a few nice pieces Wattle.jpg Blk wattle.jpg 11 Black wattle carcase.jpg


If I'd been splitting the wood in poor light, these would now be ash & CO2...

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

John, some good points from a pro - I think most folks who have never sawn their own wood from logs have a very romanticised view of yield! Even after you've chucked away the initial 40% or more of waste, there is an anxious wait to see how much degrade is going to happen. The worst of it is it's so damned unpedictable, even with species you are familiar with, and wood that normally behaves well can spring surprises on you, and often on the 'best' boards...

Getting back to the original theme of the thread: A year or two back, I cut up an old log for MIL's fireplace. It had been lying in a pile of dead wood for very long time, had quite a few deep splits from drying in the round, and a rotten centre. Apart from noting that it was darker than usual for the local wattles, I didn't think anything more of it at the time, deciding wasn't worth the effort to try & save any turning bits. Some months later, I was splitting the load, which was mostly Ironbark & some old Blackbutt. I picked up a slightly lighter block & whacked it down the middle and as the two bits fell off the block, I saw the streaky colour & the glint of beautiful, fine fiddleback! So I kept my eyes peeled for the remaining blocks & ended up with most of them making a return trip to my 'woodpile'.


If I'd been splitting the wood in poor light, these would now be ash & CO2...

Cheers,

Now theres nothing wrong with ash and CO2... all the pretty timber in the world is firewood in the making when its cold out.

Yield is the biggest issue with sawmilling. The average of a QLD mill ten years ago was around the 42% mark, but a shift in what constitutes a sawlog from crown land has seen that drop back to somewhere around 35%. Depends a bit on what the product mix of the mill is but... thats the rough enough number. So you buy a log, and throw 65% away - edgings, heart, sawdust, out of grade etc etc. Rainforest timber is a little different in that they tend to recovery better ( two grades, good and $h!t) but the "sap free" demand of the market can eat into it quick on smaller logs like I've been running. We've got around the high 30's on this lot but I've had to work for it.

So anyway, you buy 100 cube of logs and you get to freight 100 cube of logs and store 100 cube of logs.
Then you get to saw 100 cube of logs.
And come out with 35 cube of timber.
Then we bake it, and lose another 5% to degrade... end splits mostly for us... and our drying setup is very efficient. Industry average is closer to ten.
Then we get to handle that 35 cube again and get rid of the degrade and come up with 32 cube of KD.
And along the way we have to pay the interest on the overdraft facility thats allowed us to buy and process the 100 cube in the first place.

And people wonder why something that literally grows on trees is expensive. I met a rich sawmiller once - he'd taken a transitional package from the government as part of a buyback scheme.

IMG_4420.jpg
Found this little bit of timber hiding in a slab today! So nice.

Really nice! What will you do with it? Be almost a shame to do anything more then put them away to drool over at your leisure.