More adventures in lo pro milling

[Up A Creek]

The cutter

Have to be more clear than that man.
What do you mean by the latest cutters?

 

[Lightning Performance]

Do you have the latest chain available or a pic or the cutter?

 

[Up A Creek]

Are you talking about the Woodland Pro 33 RP I just got? If so I think I already posted a picture of that?

 

[Up A Creek]

Do you have the latest chain available or a pic or the cutter?

The picture I posted on the second page near the bottom is of the chain I just got.

 

[Up A Creek]

A couple more pictures of the WP 33rp. First is untouched. Second is sharpened with 7/32 file (white mark). Third is sharpened with 3/16 file.

 

[Lightning Performance]

A couple more pictures of the WP 33rp. First is untouched. Second is sharpened with 7/32 file (white mark). Third is sharpened with 3/16 file.

The smaller file adds hook and more forward bite. It will dull faster if you get into dirt or silky dust in the bark. Try both. A very good way to tune your chain to your current needs without dropping the drags at all.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

Got out the small log mill and the Makita 6421 with the 20" lo pro to resaw a short red oak edge piece today into a 20"x14"x3" block. I thought I'd never been able to get the Stihl PMX sharpened right the last time I used it. I checked the rakers, they were good, the cutters were sharp, teeth weren't perfectly even length but enough were in a tolerance range to cut okay, couldn't think of any reason it wouldn't work, and lo and behold it did cut okay. Could be better but quite fast enough for a quick job. I think it was only my one 36" loop that was a lot more nail/screw damaged that I couldn't get sorted out. So the Pferd 2 in 1 5/32 file is working just fine for me. I do need to grind the teeth on that 20" loop of 63PMX to .003 length tolerances though so it will cut as good as it should.

 

[Lightning Performance]

Got out the small log mill and the Makita 6421 with the 20" lo pro to resaw a short red oak edge piece today into a 20"x14"x3" block. I thought I'd never been able to get the Stihl PMX sharpened right the last time I used it. I checked the rakers, they were good, the cutters were sharp, teeth weren't perfectly even length but enough were in a tolerance range to cut okay, couldn't think of any reason it wouldn't work, and lo and behold it did cut okay. Could be better but quite fast enough for a quick job. I think it was only my one 36" loop that was a lot more nail/screw damaged that I couldn't get sorted out. So the Pferd 2 in 1 5/32 file is working just fine for me. I do need to grind the teeth on that 20" loop of 63PMX to .003 length tolerances though so it will cut as good as it should.

That hit loop might have bent teeth. Once they get pulled back or twisted it is over.

 

[Up A Creek]

That's the plan

 

[Lightning Performance]

That's the plan

Good plan.
It tells you things about the mill you didn't notice before. I did it upto 3/16 files on 404 and tiny little 3/32 on micro 404. 4.4mm and 4mm were used and maybe 3.7?

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

That hit loop might have bent teeth. Once they get pulled back or twisted it is over.

Yeah, I usually try to hit all the nails with my .404 and big saw. Forget to double check with my metal detector wand sometimes before resawing. And tried to saw some bad warp out of a slab with a shallow leveling cut using my ladder guide screwed on to the thicker bit of the warp I was removing, but cut too shallow and ran into the screws. Figured out after that mishap I need to set up a bridge milling system not connected to the slab for that kind of thing, quicker than a lot of router planing. Simple enough to adapt my beefy pallet rack tubing of my router planing system to run the Alaskan mill on.

 

[Lightning Performance]

Yeah, I usually try to hit all the nails with my .404 and big saw. Forget to double check with my metal detector wand sometimes before resawing. And tried to saw some bad warp out of a slab with a shallow leveling cut using my ladder guide screwed on to the thicker bit of the warp I was removing, but cut too shallow and ran into the screws. Figured out after that mishap I need to set up a bridge milling system not connected to the slab for that kind of thing, quicker than a lot of router planing. Simple enough to adapt my beefy pallet rack tubing of my router planing system to run the Alaskan mill on.

I've cut off all the screws on the ladder mount twice. Maybe I'll skip it this year.
Got a nice 404H chain missing teeth for cutting spikes. If it's walnut they want it sliced anyway. Not my money IDK. They make new chain everyday.

 

[Lightning Performance]

Yeah, I usually try to hit all the nails with my .404 and big saw. Forget to double check with my metal detector wand sometimes before resawing. And tried to saw some bad warp out of a slab with a shallow leveling cut using my ladder guide screwed on to the thicker bit of the warp I was removing, but cut too shallow and ran into the screws. Figured out after that mishap I need to set up a bridge milling system not connected to the slab for that kind of thing, quicker than a lot of router planing. Simple enough to adapt my beefy pallet rack tubing of my router planing system to run the Alaskan mill on.

Or flip the thing and cut it from the bottom. Leave the swarf in the last one. I fixed a slab once buy cutting off the bottom. It mills right through your saddle blocks. You need many wedges.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

Or flip the thing and cut it from the bottom. Leave the swarf in the last one. I fixed a slab once buy cutting off the bottom. It mills right through your saddle blocks. You need many wedges.

I was thinking of that approach. I set up some sacrificial 4 x 4's with a lip cut in the top to hold the slab in place and screwed the bottom of the 4x4 into my yard work table so I could mill at a comfortable height. I knew it would be okay to cut thru the top of the 4 x 4's and still have plenty of clearance, but wasn't sure what would happen when you lost the support of the bottom piece you're cutting off. Guess you need many wedges like you say.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

True test of my lopro setup coming up. Dragged this chunk out the neighbor's yard finally that my old neighbor four years ago abandoned when he moved out, after doing some amateur hour attempt at trying to chainsaw it into some kind of a bench. Live oak, hardest common native hardwood in the US, which we have tons of in these parts, but don't get a chance to salvage much for some reason. This has been drying at least five years and should be well toward its dry hardness numbers of 2800 on the Janka scale. (White oak, which most people consider extremely hard, is about 1400.) As I've gotten used to dealing with mesquite, the third hardest at 2300 or so, I figured this piece would be heavy but I had no idea how heavy. I couldn't even budge it in first attempts to move it. Usually tilting a heavy log or slab from one end is hard but doable, but this took all my strength to get it upright and I'm a 6'7", 230 lb guy. I've never handled wood that felt as much like concrete as this. I planed one side pretty level with my 3 1/4 planer and will put a ladder guide on it and cut it about 2.5" thick for a coffee table slab, as much as I can get after leveling out all the twist of the badly freehanded efforts. This will almost max out my 27" lopro mill width, as the piece is 26.5" at widest. Then I'll saw up the raised L of it into blocks to make a mount for an old Spanish cannon I have.

 

[Up A Creek]

That "L" piece even looks like granite.

I'm realizing how much harder white oak is than red. Can't imagine something twice as hard. And it's not even dry yet.
You can still feel some "softness" with the red oak. The white is just plain solid. Totally different feel.

That's what they made the Constitution out of, right? Live Oak?
Let us know how fast it dulls that chain.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

That "L" piece even looks like granite.

I'm realizing how much harder white oak is than red. Can't imagine something twice as hard. And it's not even dry yet.
You can still feel some "softness" with the red oak. The white is just plain solid. Totally different feel.

That's what they made the Constitution out of, right? Live Oak?
Let us know how fast it dulls that chain.

Yeah, I'm wondering what milling a genuinely dry wood this hard will be like. Cause I've dropped a big live oak with my 780 before and it wasn't too hard to crosscut. There's a world of difference between most wet and dry hardness. White oak is very hard to cut when wet, just plain solid as you say as it's notably denser wood than red oak, whereas wet red oak has some softness. (Nearly as hard as white oak when dry though.) The big white oak slabs I did last year were beasts to mill. Density is the real giveaway in comparing the oaks - or any trees - more meaningful a comparison than hardness when milling freshly cut trees. Live oak is 61 lbs per cubic foot dried where white oak is 44-47 and red oak about 41. People sometimes blithely claim that the stuff I mill can't really be that much harder to mill than cherry or black walnut and I just laugh. That stuff is like 33-35 lb/ft3.

I'm both curious to see how well lo pro fares on dry live oak and wary of completely dulling a nearly new chain on one short slab. Live oak is clearly extra heavy and extra dense and apparently a lot of bandsaw mills won't touch it because it cakes up the teeth too much, dulls them, and causes awful blade drift. Some old forum posts I saw said long dried live oak was just impossible to cut straight on a bandsaw mill for them. Yeah, "Old Ironsides" was a combination of live oak and white oak. This is an informative and hilarious look at Southern ingenuity and carbide blades conquering the milling of live oak. The home built mill is pretty much the Eighth Wonder of the World.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

So lo pro passed the gold standard of milling challenges with flying colors. Well dried live oak, around its max hardness of double that of white oak. Was easier than I expected. Not blazing speeds by any means but a little over five minutes to mill a 4' x 26" slab. A little more vibration than usual so a clean cut but not as clean as some of my other lo pro cuts. Sanded out nicely.
View attachment IMG_0096.MOV

 

[Up A Creek]

Wow
That grain is fantastic!
Is that normal for live oak?

That mill is pretty crazy. I wish I had the time to mess around with stuff like that.

Good to know on the bandsaw blades, I'll have to keep that in mind before I start cutting.

I got my LP bar and chain in today. The Oregon teeth are literally half as long as the Stihl ones.
I ordered a loop of WP too, to compare.

I may find the time to fix my 394 before I run these, so I can compare underpowered (36" bar on 575xp) vs the 394 too.

 

[Coralillo Lo Pro]

Wow
That grain is fantastic!
Is that normal for live oak?

That mill is pretty crazy. I wish I had the time to mess around with stuff like that.

I don't know what's normal for live oak because haven't seen a lot milled. The spiderweb cracks and a lot of the character I think are mostly from five years of drying outside in the sort of crude partially cut form it was in. But the grain can be pretty remarkable because of the incredible density. I'd seen some that wasn't that interesting so I'd kinda written it off as just another oak and never really sought it out, given the difficulties milling it. But now I'm really interested in getting ahold of some more.

The mill in its fully pimped form is something of only the past year or so, mostly coinciding with getting into lo pro. I went ahead and did the bolt on bar I'd always wanted to because the GB lo pro bars come set up for it and I didn't have to drill the bar myself. I finally did the simple PVC auxiliary oiler because one of my bar/chain kits came with an auxiliary oiler bolt and Chainsawbars had drilled one of the lo pro bars I bought to accept it and feed oil right into the rail. After everyone had been talking about winches for awhile and I'd been, well, you don't really need one if you tilt the log to use gravity or sharpen your chain properly so the saw kinda autofeeds, I finally caved in and set one up. I felt like an ***** for not doing it sooner. It made milling SO much easier and my cuts smoother. And finally, I tried out my 045 Super today for the first time with the custom big foam filter air intake I built you see sticking up around the handle. No real idea about the performance difference there, but can only have helped, and air filter doesn't get clogged so easy anymore