First 2015 Beach Milling - 3 Logs

[Daninvan]

Another great day milling at the beach with friends.

Weather has been bad all week, I was awoken at 4:30 this morning by the sound of rain hammering down on the roof. "No milling today" I figured and went back to sleep. By 7 AM it had stopped and turned into a fantastic day.

There were a few waves in the harbour when we arrived at the cutting area around 8:30, but after an hour or so the wind died down and it was just a really nice day.


I'd had my eye on several logs since before December. Turns out a bunch of oak showed up over the holidays, so we grabbed one of them, as well as a cherry and a Port Orford cedar.

Here is the very nice Parks Board guy with a loader setting the logs up in the cutting area for us!



I love the way the light in the morning shines on the freighters bobbing at their anchors.

Once the logs were set up, we peeled off the bark to avoid the sand that the logs accumulate while lying around on the beach. The mounted the guide board and took the first cut. This picture shows a crotch of catalpa in the front, then counter clockwise oak, Port Orford cedar, and cherry.



The first cut into the oak was looking pretty promising. Nice and dark brown. Don't know what kind of oak it is, maybe a white oak of some sort?



Just for fun my buddy who turns bowls cut the catalpa into chunks and found a couple nice crotch pieces. Unfortunately they started to crack within a couple hours.



The more cuts we made into the oak, the better it looked. Just one knot near the left end, otherwise nice dark grain.



With two mills and four guys we soon had a nice stash of slabs building up.



We wound up with four slabs of the cherry, five of elm, and four of the Port Orford. The oak was definitely the star, one of the nicest peices of oak I have ever milled. The cherry had some rot in it and we ripped the slabs lengthways to cut it out. The PO cedar had some nice sections, and smelled great as PO always does, but had a lot of knots in it.



Really liking the oak. The light colour along one edge is just due to the moisture evaporating more quickly I think.



Here's a view of our little work camp towards the end. Another guy was there with his truck loading up firewood.



The weather remained totally cooperative the entire time. Perfect weather for chainsawing, maybe 10 degrees C. A view of downtown as we were wrapping it up.



New chains from Granberg cut well, now that they have finally sent me the correct size. Had to sharpen each saw once. One of the saws started being fussy to start when it was warm. Need to do some maintenance on it. Otherwise we were done in about 4 hours, including lots of chatting, coffee drinking, and solving of many of the world's problems.

Weather is supposed to be miserable again tomorrow.

 

[BobL]

Love it!

 

[mdavlee]

Wish I could come there to mill. That looks more like red oak to me. White oak bark is usually a little thinner

 

[betterbuilt]

Awesome as usual. The best way I've learned to tell the difference between white and red oak is to look at the cell structure. A forester showed me how check them. You can see a difference if you compare the two. White oak has little circles in it(closed celled) and red oak doesn't(open celled). Red oak acts like a straw and white oak doesn't. It's easier to see, then to describe.

 

[El Quachito]

Looks like a really great time milling there. I like downtown in the bakground. Thanks for posting.

 

[beachcomber]

Always enjoy your posts, you sure seem to get a nice variety

 

[Daninvan]

Mdavlee, good tip on the bark differences between white vs red oak. I have not heard that before so I will keep my eye open for it in the future.

My tree bible, "Trees of Vancouver" lists 18 different types of oaks planted as street and park trees in town, and those are just the most common ones. Unfortunately the book uses leaf and acorn shape as the primary means to identify which type of oak tree it is, and of course by the time a log gets down to the dump the leaves are long gone. The book does helpfully add that other than the English oak the white oaks generally do not grow well in Vancouver as it is generally too cool and wet for them. So chances are that it is a red oak as you suggest.

Betterbuilt, I think you are referring to the tyloses that are visible in pores of the end grain? Unfortunately I don't carry a sharp handplane or chisel in my milling toolkit, though I should throw in an old chisel to get a clean cut of the end grain in order to view them. A photo with the cell phone camera could zoom in enough to see the structure. I did a little experiment with one of the oak slabs from yesterday.

It looks like some of the pores are open and others are closed. I would bet that the closed pores are mostly due to the rather dull old plane I used. However the presence of open pores does strongly suggest red oak.

Thanks guys!

 

[SDB777]

Always a joy to see your postings.
One of these days, you're going to have to get a Hero3 or something and video some of the fun.....



Scott (catalpa checks and cracks wildly here too) B

 

[betterbuilt]

Betterbuilt, I think you are referring to the tyloses that are visible in pores of the end grain? Unfortunately I don't carry a sharp handplane or chisel in my milling toolkit, though I should throw in an old chisel to get a clean cut of the end grain in order to view them. A photo with the cell phone camera could zoom in enough to see the structure. I did a little experiment with one of the oak slabs from yesterday.

That's kind of what I meant. I was actually referring to the top of the board. The little cells you can see on the end grain are also on the top of the board. I usually can just look at a board and see little lines with or without small circles in it. Then I know what species it it. Great picture of the end grain.
This website has some good pictures also http://hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/_anatomy/ring porous/oak/_oak.htm#whitegroup

 

[MarcusB]

^^That photo is of the end grain? Well bugger me is too.

 

[IanB22]

From the photo's it's darn close. I would say red-oak at the moment. However, if you can see the ray flecks in the quarter sawn pieces and they are 1-2"" or so in length then it is red oak. If they are 3-5" long then it is white oak. White oak is so distinctive in the ray fleck, that is how I tell them apart. Either way some great wood.


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