Another Amazing Chunk of the Giant Cherry Tree

Welcome to my backyard, and welcome to yet another sawmill adventure video. Last fall, we cut up the base of the largest cherry tree from Iowa, and I have another piece of it that I’m going to be cutting today. 

When we picked up this tree, we had some logs on Josh’s trailer and some logs on mine. Today I’m going to be cutting up this piece, which is the bigger log that I hauled back on my trailer. 

If you take a look at this log, you can see it has this big curve, as well as a crotch. Other than that, it’s mostly a straight grain kind of log.

I’m going to chop the log in half in order to get more yield out of it due to that curve. 

Before I get these two logs on the saw mill, I have to fill up my lube bottle. I’ve gotten questions about what I’m spraying on the blade quite a bit over the years. Back in the day, I just used diesel, which works a lot better than water and soap. It makes the blade run a lot quieter, and when I was in a residential area, having a quieter saw was always nice. People always suggested adding bar oil to the diesel, but I never did that because I always had the fancy bar oil that I buy for my fancy chainsaws. So one time I went out and bought some cheapo bar oil and gave this a try. It does actually help quite a bit and clings to the blade, so I actually end up using less lube compared to using just the diesel. 

I’m going to get these logs set, make my first facing cuts, roll them over, and then get slicing.

This one has some interesting things going on, with these two limb knots. There’s a smaller one down here with all kinds of bird’s eye figure around it, which is pretty cool. And the one further up has some crotch type of figure on top of that inclusion. 

On slab number five, we have some curl and undulation, which is on a diagonal. Pretty cool.

Over on this slab, we are at the pith, which is the center of the tree as it grew. You can see all the original tiny little limbs that fell off throughout the years. 

The crotch figure on this one is spectacular, because it meets up with this almost micro-curl from the limb that came through here.

Here we are to a quartersawn slab, with the pith running down the center and a lot of very straight grain. 

On this one, we’re getting away from the figure a little bit, but we have the remnants of some of the crotch, plus some really nice, beautiful clear grain. 

These have all kinds of figure, I’ve got no words! Top to bottom, nothing but crotch. Love it.

Let’s take a look at one of the last ones here as we get away from the crotch. It has that knot in the middle as well as some crazy beautiful color. 

So this was a great day! It’s nice to be outside finally, and we’re starting to get into some kind of spring weather. The crotch log was super duper extra awesome. So much amazing crotch figure in it! So, thank you as always for joining. I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the sawmill or anything back in the shop, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. Until next time, happy woodworking!