First Milling of the Fall

[Daninvan]

I do all my milling between September and May. Got off to a bit of a late start this year, had two mills going today with a bunch of friends and 'first timers'.

We milled up cherry, Port Orford Cedar, western red cedar, elm, catalpa. Broke one of my good Granberg chains but otherwise things went amazingly well.

Before the milling. All the logs raised on one end to take advantage of gravity.

After the milling. We ran out of steam and left one of the Port Orford logs.

About 2/3 of what we milled up. It all went to my friends.

Beautiful weather, and a great day!

Probably won't be doing much milling this year. I have given away most of my wood over the years, and still have way more than I will ever use. I am losing the storage space I use for it, so there is little point in getting more wood until I actually have a place to store it!

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[mtngun]

Thanks for the pics, Danivan. :msp_thumbup:

 

[BobL]

Looks nice Dan. Did you get many sightseers?

 

[Old Blue]

Say it ain't so Dan !

Can't you donate some wood to a local highschool or something in return for some storage space? Maybe they could use it to do some construction projects or something.

Your wintertime milling on the beach is one of my favorite "features" of the site ! Especiailly if it's raining on a saturday down here.

Please reconsider and see what you can do. I know I'm not the only one who'll miss it. Plus it's really cool the way the city guys set you up with the logs and all.

Old Blue
Excessively taxed and punitively over regulated in
Kali-bone-ya

 

[Daninvan]

There were gobs of visitors. I rarely mill on Saturdays but made an exception in this case to accommodate my friends who go to school out of town and have to take a ferry in. And it was a holiday weekend too, with very decent weather, so the beach was popular. Luckily there were so many of us (20?) that I was rarely personally bothered, but virtually every time I looked around one of our crew was fielding questions from passersby.

Blue, thank you for the kind words. I hope too that I can get something worked out for storage. Basically I have been using my back yard to air dry my slabs, and a neighbour's detached garage to then kiln dry and store them. So now the neighbour is selling his house and I have to vacate the garage. I have cherry picked a small number of the kiln dried slabs to keep for myself, but part of the problem is that I use the wood slowly so it builds up so much faster than I use it. I have two years of partially air dried slab inventory packed into my yard and no place for it to go after it is dry!

Anyways there are worse problems to have and I have a couple of ideas similar to what you are suggesting about where I can store smaller amounts so things will eventually work out I am sure, just not sure how and when!

Dan

 

[Timberframed]

I may have mentioned this before. You can see your milling site on google earth satellite.

 

[TraditionalTool]

:msp_thumbup:

 

[sachsmo]

Nice!

perfectly flat, but I would have to guess all that sand can be rough on chains.

 

[Daninvan]

Well, I guess in some sense everyone's milling site is visible from Google Earth! But you are right, the co-ordinates were posted a while ago and it possible to see the log dump on the beach, the pile of sawdust, etc. (49.276711,-123.21832) is pretty close to it.

Sand is a perennial problem on the beach, I'm usually pretty good about peeling off the bark to take it off. You can see in the one log we left without milling, we did get the bark peeled off the top half of it.

Dan

 

[mikeb1079]

glad to see you back at it danivan. looks like you had a regular old milling party, with some fine looking slabs too. nice work!

 

[820wards]

Dan,

As always, thanks for the great pictures.

jerry-

 

[john taliaferro]

WOW , like the slabs but tell us more bout the broke chain . Ya got that much hp or just hook something . Made me nervous when you were milling head high last spring standing on a scaffold of logs . Sure is a cool place to play er work i mean .

 

[Daninvan]

WOW , like the slabs but tell us more bout the broke chain . Ya got that much hp or just hook something . Made me nervous when you were milling head high last spring standing on a scaffold of logs . Sure is a cool place to play er work i mean .

John,

Not really sure why the chain broke. What I do know is that the person running the mill at the time was a 'first time miller', and that the mill was not being pushed smoothly, but rather being rocked back and forth quite roughly. Way more rocking than I would ever do. That's the only thing I could think of. Funny thing is, I had a different bunch of beginners out last year, and the same thing happened - new guy first timer, rocking the mill back and forth, and the chain breaks. Obviously I need to emphasize this point to newbies - smooth cutting, no rocking.

I also noticed that all the newbies pushed the mill way too hard, it was constantly bogging down. Several of them had the clutch smoking! I had to tell them many times to back off on the pushing, that the mill will pull itself thru for the most part.

When the chain broke it just died in the cut instantly, it did not whip around. This is true of the other chains I have broken myself or seen others break. Not to say that this will always be the case, but we have been fortunate so far.

Anyways, now I have two broken Granberg chains that I can hopefully combine into one working chain!

 

[Timberframed]

My shop site is in the shade of a large Black Walnut so my pile-o-sawdust is hidden. I'll be wearing a hardhat this weekend because of those green golf balls. Ouch! I saw one coming down at like mach 2 and bounce like a superball off the flat of the log.

 

[srcarr52]

John,

Not really sure why the chain broke. What I do know is that the person running the mill at the time was a 'first time miller', and that the mill was not being pushed smoothly, but rather being rocked back and forth quite roughly. Way more rocking than I would ever do. That's the only thing I could think of. Funny thing is, I had a different bunch of beginners out last year, and the same thing happened - new guy first timer, rocking the mill back and forth, and the chain breaks. Obviously I need to emphasize this point to newbies - smooth cutting, no rocking.

I also noticed that all the newbies pushed the mill way too hard, it was constantly bogging down. Several of them had the clutch smoking! I had to tell them many times to back off on the pushing, that the mill will pull itself thru for the most part.

When the chain broke it just died in the cut instantly, it did not whip around. This is true of the other chains I have broken myself or seen others break. Not to say that this will always be the case, but we have been fortunate so far.

Anyways, now I have two broken Granberg chains that I can hopefully combine into one working chain!

You should be able to use standard low-pro links to fix those chains.