How to Cut Lumber From Logs

As a wood worker, I’d like to say off the beaten path a little bit and part of that include working with species that I can’t go to a hard wood supply and get. That’s one of the things that I love about using my own saw mill to make lumber. You’re looking at a pile here full of elm. A couple of things that are really cool about this, one is I can’t buy elm from a hard wood supply, two the elm is being taken down by people who are logging in the city, it's pretty easy for me to get it delivered here on my place, three look at cool pieces like this. This is going to be a beautiful piece of crotch wood that would come out of this, I could cut that into slabs for building, I can cut those into slabs for table tops, there is pretty much mo limitation but my own imagination once that’s setup on the sawmill, about that I can get out of it.

So this is the start, a pile of wood like this, from this I can start it to process into really anything I want once I’ve got the sawmill setup. So it's just a blast to run your own sawmill, lets take a look to what it takes to get the material up on the mill. Let’s talk about back yard saw milling, this is really cool, you can have a blast doing this, the first thing we need to do is handling logs. Now don’t be scared of this, you just have to be smart how you do it, I never picked this babies up. But if you’re smart about it, you can roll the logs. So this is a technique I’m going to use, using a couple of different tools here, I’m going to roll the log all the way up to the ramp onto our sawmill and I’m going to be able to cut this log into great usable lumber.

This out weights me by a bunch, a little bit of physics, using this ramps, you can easily roll it up, we can set it in the sawmill here and be ready to make some cuts. Now what I can do here is I can elevate the log, get the log just in the right position so that it's oriented correctly, it's positioned correctly from my chainsaw cut. So this one I’m getting setup for plain sawing, a little bit more setup and I’ll be ready to fire up the chainsaw and cut planks off of this elm log. Now with that plant established, this whole log will be spun over so that plank is on the beds and we can get this done. We’re working our way toward that perfectly square cut and from that cut we’ll be able to cut the planks with that.

Now here on this end of the cut, there’s a little bit of bark left on the outside and on the wood world we call that weighing and I’m not too worried about that because as this boards gets continued to get processed especially once they’re dry and in the shop, there would be plenty of opportunity to cut that off later. Now we have a pretty scare cut here, we can start taking planks off here so at this point the cuts are pretty easy; raise the elevation take off the board. I’ll just have a look at some of the lumber that’s coming off this piece of elm and this really speaks to the question of why you want to do this, where would you get elm in the neck of the woods, the answer is you really can’t buy it. When you look at these two boards, we have a beautiful book match between this two pieces, it's just an absolutely wonderful piece of crotch that we exposed here.

So this is just one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, cutting my own wood like this because one you have access to species. You have great control over the material that you’re using, you can saw it and you just run into surprises like this like who knew that was in the log but what an absolutely beautiful piece we’re going to have out of this when this has dried and ready to go. So this backyard saw milling with the log you saw, it's just a blast to do and it really gives you an opportunity you created with your own wood supply.