Our day started out with picking out what we thought was the perfect log for what The Atlanta History Center needed.  We had a stack of logs that had come from a local property that we had paid for because it was White Oak.  By itself, white oak is a lovely wood.  It is rot and insect resistant, so it does well outside.  It is also a decently hard wood. 

Over the past few years, white oak logs, especially clean ones, have been harder and harder to get.  Part of the reason is the sudden rise in whiskey micro distilleries.  It order to make whiskey, you have to use white oak barrels, and you can only use them once.  So now, I have to compete with the barrel manufacturers to get quality logs.

Needless to say, at one point, we found ourselves paying almost as much for white oak as we did for Black Walnut, if you can believe it. 

So, you can imagine our frustration when we learn that some of the logs we paid for are actually Chinquapin oak, also known as yellow chestnut oak, yellow oak, or Rock oak.  Now technically this wood does fall into the White Oak family, but as I will explain later, it really won’t work for their project. Until I milled this log, I had not idea this species of oak even existed.

Once we realized the log was not your typical white oak, we did some more research.  We were trying to decide if this would still work for the History Center since it fell into the White Oak family. Unfortunately, what we found was that the janka hardness on this oak way too low. It was something like 790 and regular white oak is over 1300. In case you are not familiar with the janka hardness scale, it is a scale that ranks the hardness of different species of wood. The higher the number, the harder the wood.

So, with that knowledge, I took the cant off the mill, hunted for another white oak log, cut it up, and put it on the mill.

We finally milled it up and then bundled it up to make it easy the Atlanta History Center to pick up.