The Most Figured Log I’ve Ever had on my Sawmill (and it was going to be chipped)

Today, we’re cutting up this big crotchy silver maple log. 

This is quite the squat piece of wood. It’s just under eight feet long and well over food feet wide at the base, with a good splay at the crotch. 

There’s all kinds of undulation here on the outside of the tree under the bark, so there should be a decent amount of figure in here. This has been sitting out for about two years now, so it should have a nice color shift from the stark maple white to some more reds, blues, and oranges. 

We also have this piece of wire here. Who knows how deep that goes, so we’ll figure out what that’s attached to when we get further into the log. 

Let’s take a look after this first facing cut. It is all figure! A lot of curl and some quilt figure throughout, plus the spalting. This is going to give us some nice slabs I think. 

Holy hell, look at this thing! That’s all 100% curly and quilt figure all the way through there. 

And then on the lower half, there’s some spalting. 

I didn’t love the way the blade was cutting, and I noticed quite a few teeth missing on the blade, so it seems like it’s time to change the blade. People sometimes ask if I have to adjust the tracking every time I put a blade on, and I don’t, because all of the blades are identical and go exactly back in the same position. 

Even more beautiful figure on this next cut!

A little bit of crotch figure is starting to show up in this one, plus all these little burls, with more spalting at the bottom. 

Definitely getting some actual crotch figure now, and it’s just bananas. I’m partially speechless.

This one has this giant rot pocket, with a pretty large cross-section of something metal. 

Some incredible crotch feather. 

This is ridiculous! Crazy figure from the crotch, so much crazy figuring throughout, and so much color. 

There’s significantly more metal in this one compared to the other ones, and look at all of that curl!

It’s almost like there’s a pathway of curl and figure going all the way down and across this slab. 

Even more beautiful figure! This log is definitely one of those ones that surprised me. I wasn’t expecting quite the level of figure we saw in here. This has more figure than any other log I’ve ever cut. An absolutely incredible log, and I don’t know if we’re ever going to see a log like this again. Hopefully we will, because these silver maples are usually kind of junk logs for most people. Maybe that’s why I like them. 

Thank you as always for joining. I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on this beautiful log, please feel free to leave a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking!