Milling a Piece of History
This Hickory tree was huge! One log was 48 inches in diameter at its widest and 33 at the narrowest. We actually milled up two logs from this tree. The video of the second log is below the first.
You can estimate its lifespan based on average growth rates. This tree was between 181 and 247 years old! Rather than letting it go to the landfill when it reached the end of its life, it is being turned into furniture to last another 100 years, or maybe longer.
This log was quite the challenge for 2 reasons. First, it was too big for the sawmill. Second, by the time we had received the log, it already had a decent amount of rot on the outside, which makes it difficult to roll. But, after much effort, we got it done and the slabs were absolutely beautiful. The slabs are air drying until they are ready to go into the kiln. As you can see in the video below, it took us a fair amount of time to get the log where we wanted it too be and in a position where we could mill it. Once that was done, the actual milling of the slabs was fairly quick.
We milled the slabs at 2.5 inches in thickness. They are currently stacked and stickered with a fair amount of weight on them. While we cannot completely stop all the wood movement, we can take steps to minimize the wood movement and leave a nice flat slab when it comes time to turning it into a desk.
If you are interested in saving your trees and giving them a second life, send us a message. We will be posting more information about this tree and the gorgeous slabs it produced in later posts.
This 2nd log from this Hickory tree was also huge, although not quite as big. We ran into a whole set of challenges on this log as well, including hitting lots of metal. We were surprised by how much metal we hit on this log. Much of it was deep in the log, so it had to have been put there decades ago.
It took 5 sawblades to mill up this log because the metal destroys the sawblade.
We milled this log up into 1×12’s. The customer will be able to use them as either shiplap on their walls or rip them in half to use them as flooring in a room.