Big J

The way this joke has been dissected and discussed is like getting your end away for the very first time and then having to sit through a 3 hour lecture on the dangers of STDs and becoming a parent! ?

Probably put it to beam. The brown rot streaks would prove troublesome with boards.

Chestnut might be an issue unless heavily protected as the extremely high tannin content will mean it will react strongly with anything ferrous left on it. So for instance, if you left a tin on the worktop overnight (maybe the tin was wet underneath) you'd potentially have a lovely blue ring stained into the work surface. Redwood would be much too soft. It would mark quickly. Sycamore is a good timber for a worktop. Non reactive and stable.

Outstanding figure there

Better to do as the left side of that log. Stand the quarter up and resaw so that every board has a 45 degree beveled edge. This is the kind of figure I'd expect from QS oak. I knew I had the photo somewhere but it took me a while to find it!

When we did quartersawn, it was as the left hand side of the log. Presumably that is what you are doing? The reason I ask is that the medullary rays are extremely weak for QS oak. Just odd.

If you are chainsawmilling, I wouldn't go thinner than 41mm just for waste, but otherwise yes. I can't quite see from the photos but are you true quarter sawing it?

Thereabouts. When very fresh felled and uplifted quickly. Otherwise closer to 1.2m3 per tonne.

Easiest on tonnage. There is no 100% accurate way of measuring volume on a lorry as you cannot be certain of air space. Every lorry has a weigh link and any lorry can run over a weigh bridge.

Ah, no worries. If it's handleable for the little forwarder (600kg max log size practically and no steep climbing with loads) it's quite doable. Otherwise, Pontrilas are paying around £80/t delivered in at present. That's 3.7s and 4.9s down to 16cm TDUB. Bit of a premium on top of that for 6.2s and 7.4s but not really enough to warrant the extra hassle. Pontrilas will also take some fairly rough logs without complaint, as well as roughly snedded as they debark everything.

If you need a hand felling and extracting, it would be no problem. Do lots of douglas fir now - lovely timber to deal with

I wasn't trying to be overly negative. God knows I've overblown my own expectations on countless logs. It's better to be realistic and it's best not to sit on stock where possible. If you're selling it green, £25/cf would be about right, though I'd settle for £20

3 inch is a bit thicker than I would have cut it. You have to think about what the end use of it will be, and quarter sawn oak is usually used in such a way as to display it's figure. So table tops, counter tops, panelling etc. I would have cut a mixture of 32mm, 41mm and 54mm personally. Secondly, the boards are short. This counts against them, as does the weak medulary ray figure and the brown rot. Realistically, I wouldn't be pricing them much above normal oak. 6-7 years ago I had some really nice QS oak. One batch of standard and one batch of brown. The standard went out at £45/CF, the brown £48/CF. That was kiln dried.

You can always mix and match with larger logs. Slab through and through for half of the logs, then stand the resultant half up and plank it with one straight edge. That way, you can create a tidy stack 4-5ft wide by putting one waney and one straight edge board on each layer. Untidy stacks would drive me nuts at the sawmill. It's the German in me.

Fair point. I'm just thinking from the point of view of production milling, putting large quantities of high quality and easily handlable boards into stick and into stock. Getting 1 - 1.5m diameter timber, quartering it and then resawing with a conventional bandmill is one of the best ways to do this. Double waney edge slabs are OK for low volume markets, but they are a (profitable) niche and I wouldn't want to exclude the possibility of producing quarters if I was wide slabbing. Any timber is more stable when quarter sawn, albeit with some timbers you might lose some of the figure. Anything pippy or burry for instance.

Things in life more unpleasant than chainsaw milling: Forensic tax inspection root canal dental work hand quartering logs

It's a useful bit of kit certainly but is better as a stand-alone mill as it's unable to break down large logs into quarters or halves due to the lack of vertical throat.

If you're at the stage of looking to spend £25k on a tractor, you're at the stage of needing to be VAT registered.

I'll ask him. What throat would you need?

I was super impressed until it poured a shit pint. Plus, as a bar attendant, it's rather lacking in the cleavage department! ?

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I've cut yew like that before, both with the chainsaw mill and also the Trakmet. I understand that there is a market demand for such slabs, but I'd encourage you to only cut them when absolutely necessary. As a rule when I had the Trakmet sawmill, I never put wide boards into my own stock. I'd cut wide boards for other people, whether on contract milling with their timber, or supplying it from my roundwood pile, but they always assumed the risk. A dedicated chainsaw slabber/halver might be the cheapest way to produce big boards when you need them, and break down larger logs for further resawing on a bandmill the rest of the time. Such a machine would be brilliant for quartering oak for quarter sawing too.

That is a reach shame. The back end of the truck is processor grade and the front end would mill OK

My inclination is that if you are finding that you've a ready supply of large diameter logs, that having a chainsaw based log halver fabricated would be the way to go. Before I got the Trakmet saw, I used to halve all of my larger logs with a chainsaw mill with extra long uprights. It's not that easy, and isn't something you'd want to leave your employees doing. £7-10k would probably see you to getting a carriage based chainsaw mill. Spec it with a 120-140cm throat, and it would mean you could halve just about anything. Or, you could mill it through and through if you are feeling masochistic. I can't stress enough how stable boards are from large logs, with one side straight edged through the heart. They mill really quickly on the sawmill (you just stand the half up vertically, mill through until you're a board shy of the heart and flip the cant) and you eliminate 95% of all movement and drying defect. It's brilliantly easy for your customers to select bookmatched boards as you'll have thousands of them, all of them with a perfect straight edge (not a rough and ready edge from free hand halving). If I were milling hardwoods again (which I won't) then that is the way I'd go. Wide throat bandsaw technology is hit and miss, and you'll get perfect cuts until suddenly the blade decides its' blunt halfway through a cut and you waste £200 worth of timber. If the carriage based chainsaw mill is interesting for you, I've got a little one coming from TCF engineering next week which could be scaled up I'd have thought. Mine's only 3.5kw 240v on an 18" throat, but you'd fly through the timber on 10-15kw three phase.

I always liked the look of the Cook mills and I did consider them when I imported my Logmaster LM2 from Texas. Now as regards wide cuts. There are so many issues with wide boards and they include: you have to have complete handling for logs and boards of that size. Logs can easily weigh 5000kg, and 500kg boards aren't uncommon. they are prone to serious drying defects, whereas simply ripping out the heart leaves two very wide, very stable boards that can be rejoined together. they much up your stacking system, as they have to be stacked in log form, as no stack will accommodate two wide boards wide. cutting accuracy on a 40mm band would be unreliable at best. With 1.3m between the guides, there is little to stop a little blade like that deviating, and possibly wasting a very expensive log. My point is that in my experience, wide boards are best avoided if at all possible. Otherwise, mill with something with a very wide blade and you might be OK!