Milling Earl's Fir

Earl Johnson is 85 and a retired shipwright out of the Bremerton Naval Shipyard…a gentleman who can tell ya about the days of coal-fired steam for sure. Earl lives on Hood Canal and needs to redo his wharf, so he chose the big Doug Fir right next to the house… the one getting bigger and bigger and making the Missus nervous.

Problem is, the fir is in a tight spot…room to drop it but no room to handle it with most mills…and it wouldn’t be economical to hire a self-loading log truck to haul it just a couple miles to a sawyer with a local mill. The local Woodmizer and Timberwolf guys didn’t want to do it because there was no room for the machine required to load logs on the carriage. So Joe Emel, the friend and arborist who’s gonna fall it for Earl, shanghaied me to bring in my Lucas ‘cause he knows it can mill them where they lay on the ground...and easily move the mill to the next log. I agree to do it because these men are friends and I can use some quartersawn doorjamb material and boat framing.

So Joe and I fall the tree late one morning so I can break down my mill and move it to Earl’s place before it gets too dark and begin milling the next day.

Joe making the face cut in the 44” DBH fir...



Back cut started and wedges being driven…



Finishing the hinge …falling…



Exactly where I asked him to put it so there’d be room for the mill…as from here on out this wood can only be moved by hand. The two top sections chunked down during the limbing/topping operation on the left are light enuf to peavey out of the way.



We buck them into the lengths Earl requires, move the tops and set up the mill…by the time this pic was taken one of the rough tops had been cut into bearers and stickers and the center log opposite to it had been jacked into the mill.



Joe, like most fallers here, prefers light Husky saws with 36” bars. As my use is primarily bucking for the mill where I don’t carry it or even use it much, I have a bigger Stihl 046 with an aftermarket hop-up kit installed. Shortens engine life, but Stihl cylinder repair kits run only 50 bucks these days on Ebay, and I’m stocking up. One heavy saw to tote, tho. For where you have to move logs by hand that are too heavy for peavies, the trusty old 48” farm jack and the ancient 1950’s all-steel Homelite Zip with Lewis winch come out of war reserve...the Zip treated to new cable and anchor chain for the occasion. If you can tunnel under that log, you can wrap a winch or come-along cable around it, drive the hook in with your falling axe, and cross-haul it to roll it around.



Rolling the logs instead of simply setting them on bearers with the backhoe is heavy labor...slow...and unprofitable...and another reason others turned it down was the slope that makes milling difficult. We couldn’t get either the mill or the log level…only a shallow enuf slope to make the job workable but strenuous.



Cross-hauling with a winch is fast but a bit of a chore working alone. An easier but more strenuous method is rolling the log with the farm jack, kicking a wedge in as you jack to keep the 8-10,000-pound log from rolling back and breaking your leg. But the farm jack doesn’t like that much weight so get a good one if you are gonna do this.



Continued on Milling Earl’s Fir II

Preview of the next installment, which will have to wait for this weekend's high winds to die down...working in the woods in high winds is logic that guy Darwin wrote about...hope the mill doesn't take a hit:

http://pic3.picturetrail.com/VOL12/1104763/3223936/ 39615173.jpg

 

Nice photos, Bob; thanks for sharing. It's 'specially nice to see that you're wearing proper safety gear for the job - so many refuse to when they're not under the eye of the bossman.

 

"...when they're not under the eye of the bossman."

Actually....I am kinda the bossman.

 

Continued from Milling Earl’s Fir Part One.

Six by six Bearers cut from the rough tops are laid and leveled in preparation for receiving milled stock…green boards are heavy and you only want to handle them once.



With the mill and log as level as we can get them, we align the mill’s tracks with the top of the log for the first cuts. Earl asks me to idle the mill so he can see how it works…a swing blade circle mill can cut on either side of the log with either the vertical or the horizontal cut made on each pass…on this mill, maximum vertical cut is 8 ½ inches and maximum horizontal cut is 8 ½ inches, but reversing the powerhead frame and attacking the log on the same plane from the opposite direction will give a total horizontal cut or 17 inches. It is ideal for quartersawing by the “one square edge” method as seen in the pic.




To better demonstrate, I complete that board desk and move the mill to the head of the tracks for resharpening, as it’s time…the shaving noodles flying from the mill are getting shorter in length. With the blade guard and water tank removed, you can see the blade, hub and transmission in the vertical position as son Jake moves to the operator position to control the swing mechanism.



Jake moves the swing handle a tad and you can see the sawblade begin to drop toward horizontal.



Jake moves the sawblade back to vertical, I attach the chainsaw sharpener with diamond wheel to the jig built into the mill and touch up the carbide tips…the sawguard is replaced, the water tank that cools the sawblade is filled and we are ready to go again in 5 minutes.



Vertical milling continues using the One Square Edge method until near the pith…



At the pith the technique changes to flatsawing to maximize vertical grain…notice I will make this 8 ½” horizontal cut in two passes instead of one…the tradeoff for a thin-kerf 3/16” blade is that it is flexible, and you can warp it easily with too big a horizontal bite.



And the log is completed using a combination of vertical and flatsawing all the way to the bottom bark. This 2d log had no taper…when we mill the first log, we’ll have to adjust the mill when we reach the pith to get parallel to the bottom bark, taking the waste produced by the taper out of the pith instead of making a cant like we would to with a band mill.



Continued on Milling Earl’s Fir Part 3.

 

Bob,
Phew! The load time on this thread was forever. I must say it was worth the wait. I wish you were a neighbor of mine. Is your rig fed by hand? Thanks for sharing this with us.

Gary