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Mill We harvest
only trees which the forest is ecologically ready to give up; the
naturally selected out ones. So the trees we are presently milling
are 10 inches or less in diameter. Naturally selected out trees
grow slower from falling behind their neighbors who have overtopped
them, leaving them in complete shade. So their annual growth rings
are very narrow and close together. Though this means near death
for them, for carpentry it means good quality strong But now we have small diameter logs to work with and so don’t need a big expensive mill for larger ones soon. Jerel built our own mill to handle these first years of skinnier trees, which helped to keep our overhead down, thus making this kinder forestry, economical at the beginning of the process. If a tree is even as small as 4 inches in diameter, we mill it, which gives us about 2 boards, an inch thick and about 2.5 to 3 inches wide. To make these into larger boards needed in furniture, Jerel has a machine called a jointer. The jointer perfectly planes the edges of the boards, straight, so he can glue 2 or more of them, together, into a wider plank. With Jerel’s own labor, he was able to fabricate a mill for about $1000. He purchased and used the largest shop-size band saw, by removing the stage and legs. He turned it on its side, welded a cage around it and attached steel wheels. It rolls back and forth on a track, sawing through logs held there, in grippers. The cage allows the saw to be lowered and raised for sawing varying thick nesses. It took a summer of “head scratching” due to a problem of the blade “diving” and creating an un-even face on the plank. The simple answer was the blade had become dull! After our logs are cut into lumber, the method we use for drying the green boards, is air drying in sheds. These sheds are simple outdoor well-ventilated structures built from logs too small in diameter to mill and from the outside bark covered pieces of wood, cut off the log before being made into boards. Since we do not sell our raw lumber, we get as much width into each board that the log allows, instead of milling our boards into standard widths, and having waste. Drying sheds Drying sheds must amply protect the boards from the rain and sunshine, but have ample air circulation. So we elevate our sheds off the ground, sitting them on concrete cinder blocks. The ground under the blocks needs to be perfectly flat and level, so the shed is all perfectly square and thus the drying boards dry in a flat plane. The floor of the shed is made out of 2X6’s, set on edge, and spaced about 2 feet apart. Log corner posts hold a lean-to roof 8 feet above the floor. The walls are an open network of hung, and nailed down, slab wood (rounded pieces of log with the bark still on it). “Mill wastes” The usually cast away slab wood that comes off the outside of the log, we found, was not waste. The ones from very small logs, not only make light weight drying shed walls, but the larger ones make attractive bark trimmed lumber for rustic applications. Some slab is so thick at one end, due to the conical shape of naturally selected out trees, that with re-sawing, usable wood can be salvaged from slab, for smaller products. Two other uses for slab could be to return them to the forest floor to replace fertility removed in tree harvest, and for firewood. |
wood. In the future, as we continue to log according to this criteria,
the diameters of the trees which the forest is ecologically giving-up,
will become bigger, but the close growth ring nature will continue.
