The Milling

My childhood friend Rob Parrish owns the company Frontier Mill and Woodworks. He has a mobile sawmill that he can drive anywhere, so we got him to come by for a few days to do the milling.

To set up the sawmill, Rob had to get it perfectly level so all the cuts would be straight. After quite a bit of shimming and back and forth, he got it just how he wanted, and we started the work. We then lined up the logs to feed them into the loader you can see in the photo below.

Rob knew how much of each type of lumber we needed, so he would figure out which logs would give the best yield of the various cuts, and then proceed accordingly. I would clear away the slabs (the outer bark cuts) that were scrap, and move the completed good cuts of lumber to the piles where we were stacking them up. John worked the tractor to move around the logs in prep to load, and drank a lot of coffee. You can see below the slab stack, the various lumber stacks, and the sawdust accumulating from all the cuts. The red cedar is a beautiful bright purple when it is first cut. After a few days of exposure to sunlight this changes to the more subtle red that most people would recognize.

Here's some video of Rob making a cut, you can see he's constantly lining everything up to get the best yield possible while still making a nice long cut. I hadn't appreciated how much nuance there was in the process, and how much calculating needed to be done so you don't waste anything. It was pretty clear Rob had been doing this a long time. While the milling process throws up a lot of sawdust and such, one thing that is super nice is the smell of cedar all around. That great scent is in the air all day long, and it makes the job really pleasant and special.

We also cut some walnut slabs, John wanted to give it to a friend who is an expert woodworker so he could make a chest or table.

Something that happens more often than not is you hit a nail or wire embedded in a tree. A lot of the trees used to have barbed wire around them as fencing, and as they grow the wire gets in there to the point where you can't see it. We busted a blade somewhere in the process, and Rob broke out a new one. That thing was sharp and scary. He has a way of opening so he doesn't get too close and get hurt. Have a look below.

It took us about 3 days to cut all the lumber. It was a fun time, it's nice to be out in the cool and crisp Fall air enjoying the work. We go into a nice rhythm and the time would fly by. Here's a nice shot of the the crew.

We ended up with almost 4 pallets of slabs (the extra stuff you don't use to build, which we cut up some for wood stove firewood, and the rest we gave away) and 4 pallets of lumber. We also had about 6 big trash cans worth of great red cedar sawdust, which we used for the horse stalls. Even with all that coffee John still found time to take a rest on his new lumber, although he did wake up for a final shot.

We put come along straps around the lumber pallets and moved them into our tractor barn for safe and dry storage during the winter. Normally when you first cut lumber you put spacers or 'stickers' in between the pieces when you stack them, so that the wood can dry out well. We didn't do this step this time as it was a lot of effort for not that much reward. John was pretty confident the wood would dry well and relatively straight, which it did in the end, so all was fine.