wills-mill

The last photo is what tends to be called Tiger Oak, it's brown but with a lot of black speckling and striping. It's not my cup of tea particularly, but a lot of people rave about it.

Sand Spider is right, it's just normal Oak (pedunculate/ English) that has been partially digested by beefsteak fungus. It seems to be abundant in certain areas and pretty rare in others. It's verra nice.

Sooooo, it's December. There are floods and the mighty Oak is asleep and has no leaves. How does this have any logical leg to stand on? If someone had covered every scrap of Dales, Fells and general Pennine moorland in blanket tree planting in the last year, there would be such a political kerfuffle about the Brontes, Wainwright, 'desecration of magnificent unspoiled mountains' and the loss of habitat for the ring tailed ouslelizard..... If people want to make a decent ecological point that's great, but that meme is no more than cheap political points scoring. If the current flooding had happened in the tropics when some cheeky chaps had clear felled 25,000 hectares of virgin rainforest to plant palm oil, soya (or goji berries for the health food shop) then I'm with them. Otherwise they're just spreading a completely false point.

There's some Grade 1 shininess on that site 3000hr Valtra T203 for £59.5k how much was that new??

Brown Oak won't last particularly well as fencing exposed posts unfortunately. I'm not sure I'd trust it for beams as well, it definitely loses strength as the colour increases. It's a bit of a gamble on big old dead lumps, probably 50/50 that I've tinkered with are hit hard with pinhole borer. They can get right to the centre, but sometimes only chew chew into one segment of the tree, so often there are clean sections....

A complete set of tipping gear from a Cabstar or similar would give you a good start?

I'll keep my eyes peeled. Surely they've got a fair amount of Welly and Coast Redwood in the States?

Mr Rye, do you have a spec of bio oil that is suitable as a wide bandsaw blade lubricant? Usually drip fed to a felt wiper that is in contact with the blade.

I did get there in the end. Had all the covers and belts off the drive side of the saw. In the end I decided to change the main drive bearings after finding that the oil in the bearing housing was emulsified and milky. It's a pig of a job, getting the bearing housing out is quite easy after getting the blade wheel, brake and drive pulleys off (you need a decent puller), but aligning everything afterwards is very tricky, there's very little access when everything is back together. Glad I did it though. The bearings (one roller/ one ball) didn't feel too bad when the unit was on the bench, but after cleaning everything off with the parts washer (removing snotty emulsified oil) there was definite wear and a grumble in the ball race). My only thought to Wood Mizer is that it's a shame that there is no oil drain port. There's a filler plug and a level plug, but to drain you'd have to fiddle around and slurp the oil out of a small horizontal hole. I'm kicking myself now that I didn't drill and tap a plug into the housing when it was all apart. For anyone thinking of doing the job (or disturbing the bladewheels), you can align them both in the same way that the blade guides are aligned with blade guide alignment tool (BGAT- the ruler with the clip). Take the guides off completely and tension a blade between the wheels, the check their alignment to the bed to see if they sit squiffy to each other. The tracking on each wheel can also be done, but one tweak on one thing affects everything else- not a job to rush!! -------- I think I was getting a fair bit of drive belt slip as well. Some of the forum chat about wandering cuts in the USA seems to centre on the blade speed dropping off (but engine speed staying the same). After 2000hrs I treated the old dear, although the old belt was worn, it was suprisingly healthy for having done hundreds of thousands of cuts and those squeaky Woodmizer blade engagements. Some times it's easy to grumble about manufacturer charges on wearing parts, and although I got my bearings in from my local supplier, I found that WM were very fairly priced on the main drive belt, which would otherwise be a special order with a couple of weeks wait.... I've picked up an optical tachometer so I can check engine revs, I'm never sure how close I am running to 'proper' blade speed.

Not brilliant photos, but not bad for 10 years ago. I made up this spiky bar to hold interesting curved and small logs on the old Onan engined LT40. There was a similar spike on an angle iron shoe that slipped onto the clamp (I don't know why it's not fitted in the photo). I found I could get grip and so decent cuts without moving the logs and having to skim cut and re-align, even when there was only curvy bark for the clamp to catch. It's slight overkill, and for most tiddly stuff a hefty board for the clamp to catch and a few Timberlok screws usually does the job. I tend to wind one of the screws up through the board into fresh air in front of the log as a visual reminder of where the tips of the screws are......

There's a bit of a balancing act to get the first boards cut so that your remaining cant has a square enough edge to clamp sensibly without popping up from the bed. It can be useful to drop a sacrificial scrap board behind the log so that the back supports can be lowered a reasonable amount. I was resawing some wide chainsaw milled Yew this week (and the Yew slabwood) and it's an awkward job. Do you have the earlier 'flip up' orange clamp, or the later hydraulic ram clamp? The early one really benefits from having a clip on 'shoe' fabricated with a spiked dog for small logs..... It's helpful on the hydraulic clamp as well, but it generally means drilling through the top of the clamp head to bolt something on. I'll see if I've any old photos (not very hopeful)

Nice. The joints end up a bit like the reinforced epoxy fillets used on ply for modern boatbuilding. I've milled some bits in the past for a local chap who made hollow core wooden surfboard with Thuja, they were built up almost identically to a plane wing, with a central spar and shaped ribs across. They end up really light and amazingly stiff and tough. The shell is coated with a thin epoxy finish and a thin glassfibre tissue that is transparent when wetted by the epoxy. The board builders were very keen on plant based resins, I think it's commercially available now from a few firms. Tree to Sea Wooden Surfboard Builders Forum - Index page

Heating oil price panic about 5 or 6 years back (and cold winters)- so lots of folk fitted wood burners. As other people have said, that caused a rise in the price of cordwood with massive demand. Now the opposite is happening, slumping oil price, people have got over the glamour and novelty (and labour) of wood heating, warm winters aren't exactly helping.

The spec 'no heart on face' is presumably asking for the pith to remain boxed within a beam and not displayed on the surface of a face. If there are going to be any loose sections 'shelling' or shaking out of a beam, then the pith/ dead heart is the place it's going to happen.

Can't help I'm afraid. I've my own fabricated shingle-o-matic that I was thinking that I might sell and get hold of the WM shingle/lapsider so I can start cutting featheredge (after 14 years getting by with plain boards). But the WM attachment turns out to be £1350 before VAT, so I may do some poking with the welder to make my own feather-o-matic and keep the shingle device. I know 2 people who use a simple plywood gadget for shingle cutting, they are very effective, but a bit tedious moving the spacers for every cut. Like this, but it's fairly easy to dispense with the pipe clamps at the back and wind a screw into the bottom corner of the blocks to act as a clamp and a pivot point. Then spacers are slipped in under the 'front' to give a taper. [ame] [/ame]

Cheeky longhorn blighters. There's a few types of them, they and everything else loves eating Hornbeam Give the logs a swim in ProBor?

Garden centres are a good start. Sawn Chestnut goes down well as a gun peg for shoots. Try your local farmers emporium as well.

It's also tricky to get good recovery if you've got one order for decent sized posts and nothing else on the books. There's only so many multiples of 5x5 or 6x6 in a tree. Sometimes an order for boarding or smaller stud type material is a real benefit when milling larger sections, then you can get a steady build up of both as you work. The other thing to do is be knocking out a stock size with a few uses that can also be recut or planed in future.....

No prob. It's tricky using the small bits, there's a real balance between saving money and blowing any profit by faffing about for ages to recover the odd kilo of timber. You soon start getting ruthless when you work out the economics of it..... As with all these things, sometimes a tiddly order or product will lead to other things and great regular customers. Sometimes not I do keep the tidier slabs for people to make up rustic sheddage (some went into a ranch steak restaurant recently), and if I'm buzzing into Chestnut for heavy fencing, I keep back 1 1/2in boards to knock into tree stakes.

Mr Edmund Hoppus published the initial Hoppus tables. The method of published tables had been used previously, but I believe he was first to use an imperial decimal system (ie 48.75hft rather than 48 3/4 as printed). There's mention of an alternative system used by the Admiralty (which may have been more realistic), where you don't divide by 144, but (memory not serving well) possibly 128? EDIT: no, scratch that, the Admiralty measure gives a larger figure for a given log size.... Hoppus ft is an entirely theoretical volume, found within perfectly cylindrical logs and the system doesn't take account for saw cuts or processing as far as I'm concerned. For true content it is probably best to measure quarter girth at the small end of the log, not midpoint. For actual milling scales, in the States they seem to use 3 (more? anyone?). From memory and the old Wood Mizer paperwork there's Doyle, Scribner, and Decimal C. They made allowances for circular saw cutting, so any band mill should be able to cut overscale. Anyhoo that's all by the by. If you can recover 60 to 70% of your initial log, you are doing well. There will then be further loss to consider- your customer may be paying for a smaller proportion, as you may well take a 14ft log to create a 12ft beam, and maybe only get a couple of gravel boards out of the slabs. All the way down the line there will be minor losses due to internal defects, crosscutting, drying defects, planing..... Daily output of the saw is not the same as output of the yard The quality and usable volume that you get from the log is much more down to the operator than the price of the saw

The beauty of a narrow band is you don't cry every time a band is wrecked by a hidden bolt. £20 odd for a WM sized blade, up against minimum £80 for a Stenner resaw, £120+ for a Stenner band rack size. Wravor/ Serra/ WM1000 band prices are presumably similar. Edit: Stenner type resaws need a really spot-on initial flat surface to work from, and you're still faced with lugging the timbers back and forth over the mill. And they tend to get very grumpy and gummed up doing lots of deep cutting in reclaimed timber. Exotic tipped wide bands are generally double that, they'd last longer but aren't entirely nail proof, by the time the base steel has sheared off with the stellite tooth attached and it all tumbles around in the cut, there'll be sobbing in your cornflakes. For resawing beams you'd not need need too many exotic gadgets and hydraulic handling, but a debarker head would be very handy to clean a slot for the band to enter into the wood. Years of dust and grime blasted into the surface is a killer for tooth life. I've always done WM mills, they are nice and rigid and quick to set up, I've had a play with a few simple cheap saws and think everything cuts fairly similarly, but it can be a bit of a ballache getting (and keeping) a light ladder framed mill aligned. For recutting dense, dry timbers you need something that'll hold the band tidily, so a good stiff head, well fixed and engineered blade guides, good band cooling and lube. Other than that, it's all down to keeping the bands up to scratch, local support, and personal preference. Some of the simpler mills lack much ability to compensate for wear and tear over the years, in many ways longevity is down to being able to keep them tight to the original build spec. As you know from joinery kit, sometimes cheaper isn't necessarily any worse.

Tidy system, but presumably all the stop/start activity will kill off the engine a lot faster than if it burbled away at a steady temperature and load?

It's a sensible idea Dave, I just loved the double nimbyism of not wanting the plantation in the first place, then not wanting to deal with the timber at the point of harvest. The irony of a 'wilderness' with an arrow straight Roman road and a massive Victorian viaduct

OK, it's a couple of years old. Not quite sure what to say about this one. The fight to save the Roman Cam High Road in the Yorkshire Dales - Walks - Yorkshire Life

Breakers have an amp rating and a trip speed rating (for want of a more technical term) for sensitivity to a current/amp spike. So there'll be 32A, 32B, 32C, 32D. A and B generally are generally recommended for domestic use, then C's for big motor start up (workshop) then D's for grumpy welders and things with a large start up load. If you're looking for rental free welding gases, also have a look at Adams Gas and Hobbyweld. I'm on pure CO2 in a MIG, but will head to an argon mix when the current bottle is emptied. It looks like our local motor factor are Hobbyweld supplier, which saves hiking round the country or paying BOC. Hobbyweld also do Oxygen, so you could run an Oxy-Propane setup for making things red and floppy with no rental....