Cherry Logs 15 and 16 at the Beach

Daninvan · Mar 21, 2013

Down to the beach again today, after a good session earlier in the week.

Defintely a brighter day today than Tuesday, but a bit of a chill, only 1 degree above freezing this morning, there was ice in the lane. Mountains up Howe Sound look great with a dusting of snow.

This is a good shot of the little area we mill at. It's maybe a 100' foot wide section right beside a path along the beach. Most of the area is dedicated to skinny stuff that people buck up for firewood.

The city guys are good enough to set up the logs for us using their loader. They let us and the firewood cutters take as much as we can. Otherwise the city has to pay to load the logs into dumpsters and haul them away to be chipped up.

Today we took on a couple of cherry logs. It has been a great year for cherry at the log dump. I am pretty sure thse are cherry logs 15 and 16 this year, there are still a few more to go through! The log in the foreground is about twice as long as the other log, my photography technique resulted in some foreshortening!

It didn't take long for this cloud to appear from the hill behind us to the south.

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Daninvan · Mar 21, 2013

So we set up the guide boards and peeled the first piece off each log. The longer one has a very visible graft line between the trunk and the flowering wood.

This family came by and watched us for a while. The kids seemed quite interested in the chainsaws, then they wandered off.

We wound up with 4 slabs 3 ½” thick from the small log, and 4 slabs from the larger log. We started milling the larger log at 3 ½”, but it was too heavy for us to carry, so we cut it into bowl blanks and did the rest of them at 2 ½”. We got 6 bowl blanks, all 3 1/2” thick. Some of the slabs were cracked in the middle so we went ahead and ripped them down the middle to make them easier to carry.

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discounthunter · Mar 21, 2013

simply amazing.the city should contract you all for all the money you've saved them!

golddredgergold · Mar 21, 2013

You guys sure got one heck of a good deal going there. I hope no knot heads ruin it for some stupid reason and you get some more great wood and pictures for us to see. I click on every post to see the pix and get inspired to get out. I think many of logs been milled due to your inspiration to get out and do it! Keep them coming!

Daninvan · Mar 21, 2013

Someone else had a kite going for a while, great day for that with a brisk wind. Luckily for us the clouds remained puffy and non threatening. Sorry the image is sideways.

As usual we just left a few scraps.

There was a paddleboarder came by towards the end. We weren't sure if he noticed that it was only a few degrees above freezing! Perhaps he drifted off course from Hawaii?!

Someone came by yesterday and marked a whole bunch of logs in the dump. It is nice to see someone besides me using all this wood and preventing it from going to waste.

Just as we were leaving a dumpter came along, this is the one they fill up and costs them around $400 to have hauled away. Seems kind of pricey to me, but I'm not an expert on it and apparently that's what it costs.

There are only a few more cherry logs left now, I hope to get to them in the next couple weeks.

I think if some of the images are too big for the screen, if you click right click on them and then depending on your browser is, open them, you can see the whole image.

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Daninvan · Mar 21, 2013

I also forgot to mention that we were in and out of there in about three hours. It was one of those rare days when everything went right with the equipment.

I had sharpened the chains up the day before and all saws and mills worked well. I had also preset the mill heights to what I thought we would be using. Nothing broke, got loose, or required any fiddling or fooling. I changed the height of one mill just once. Never had to sharpen at all. The exteernal oiler gushed oil happily without clogging.

We did notice that the mill with the Granberg ripping chain on it was less prone to grabbing than was the mill with the full comp chain on the other saw. Both saws were Husky 3120s. Both chains had their rakers set to 6.5 degrees just a couple logs before, and the teeth on both were both sharpened to around 5 degrees, so it was interesting to note the difference in performance. There was no difference to the quality of the cut surface, but the Granberg chain seemed to cut with less vibration, was easier to keep the revs up, and did not grab or dive as much as the other chain did.