Silver Maple Log with an Embedded Chain on my Sawmill

Welcome to my backyard. Today we’re going to play with the sawmill. 

Let me show you what we’re going to cut. I have quite a pile of logs that I have to get through, but today we’ll take care of this guy, which is laying here in the shade. This is a leftover log from my workbench kits last year. After getting it back here and looking a little closer, I figured it’s not really the best fit for my workbenches, because it is kind of small in diameter for that purpose and it’s got a lot of crotches. It should have a lot of character in it, there’s some burl action and I can see some curl in a couple places. It’s been sitting out here for over a year now, which should give it plenty of time to start staining and discoloring. So I expect this to have more reds, yellows, and blues than just being stark boring white. 

I did get some questions about how this log was felled when I showed it in the workbench kit video, because these felling cuts look kind of weird. This was actually cut down by a hot saw feller buncher. So that machine has a large saw blade on the end of it, with a two or a three inch curve that takes it out. On a normal size tree, they could fell it in one little fell swoop, but since this one is so big, they had to come in a few different times to get all the way through it. 

Two observations: this log looks a lot bigger now it’s on the saw, and it’s also quite a bit longer than I thought it was. This must be around 13 feet. So I’m going to clean up the end with the felling junk, and that’ll buy me the extra length that I need to scoot this thing all the way back on the sawmill. Other than that, I like this orientation for cutting.

We have two main crotch stems in plane. We’re going to ignore the limb up top and focus on the two big crotches. 

After removing that chunk up top, I’m ready to start making the actual cuts. 

Just as I was trying to figure out what height I wanted to cut this at, I saw this little gem sticking out of the top. That’s a link from a piece of chain, meaning there’s probably something else deeper inside of there. For me personally, I really like these metal inclusions. It really gives a sense of the tree’s history, and what someone did to it at some point. If this was further down in the log, I’d be very much inclined to leave this in place, saw right through it, and leave that inclusion in the wood. I think that’s an awesome way to preserve the history of the tree. But since this is so close to the end, and this would likely be trimmed off anyway when the slab is used, I can’t really justify cutting through that. So I’m going to cut this back further, and maybe we’ll take it apart and see what exactly is in there later. But first I’m going to make my surfacing cut, and then we’ll deal with what’s going on here. 

Let’s take a quick look and see what we have. This is all figured and a little bit curly through here, with a couple of bark inclusions. We have some fun wavy grain here. 

This is going to be a gorgeous log. I love that with silver maple, you let it sit for a while and you get all this vivid color and grain. This one has that bark inclusion, obviously, but you can see all of the color that’s coming in here. Less of the white and more yellows and blues and reds. 

This next slab has some fun figure in here, with some beautiful color. 

This slab has some kind of burl or curly bark inclusion. 

And it has this nice split up here. It’s a bark inclusion, or an old bark inclusion, up to this crotch area. All the crotch figure is consumed by the rot pocket area there. 

That’s a lot bigger and heavier than I thought. 40 inches at one end, 36 inches in the middle, and 52 inches on the other end. I thought it was a lot smaller than that. 

This is definitely going to be a significant bark inclusion. It’s going to be prominent, through most of the log, but I am really liking that. 

More sawing to do. And I definitely cut through my side stop by accident. Luckily with that carbide blade, I am far less worried about cutting through metal objects. 

On this next slab, we have a little bit of rot going on down here with some insect tracks, and some spalting over to the left. 

Slab number seven. It has a structural issue on one end. We’ve got this bit of shake, but I think it’s a really fun and interesting detail. 

I left the slab on the forks overnight, so this is some surface level staining from my forks. 

But here is how big that void defect is. This is all negative space, and nothing is here holding the slab together all the way down through most of the slab. So these are two halves that could come apart at any point, but I absolutely love the split through the middle. 

Let’s take a look at number eight here. We’re getting some wood coming back here in the middle, filling that void space. 

This is where that side stop was that I cut through. So you can see some of the little bits of iron in here. And you can see that the surface finish doesn’t look any different from before to after cutting through that side stop. Really a testament to those blades. 

That’s some cool stuff right there. There’s a lot going on there. 

Slab eleven is gorgeous. We have some figure and some spalting coming through. There’s a lot going on in these slabs. 

Let’s take a look at this last one. Some spalting and some color at this end, but otherwise pretty clear, simple, nice traditional-ish wood. 

So we got 12 slabs out of here. 11 pieces at ten quarter or heavy ten quarter and then one piece at about 15 quarter. I’m really glad that I didn’t try to cut this log into workbench kits. I probably could have gotten one or two out of there, but they would’ve been in the middle of some of the structural defects. I’m glad I made some slabs out of it, because these are some pretty awesome slabs. It’s definitely a better use of the log versus trying to make workbench kits. 

That is going to do it for this one. Thank you, as always, for joining. I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the sawmill, or slabbing, 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. And until next time, happy woodworking.