milling thread

[MasterBlaster]

That's some sexy looking wood!

 

[Al Smith]

As soft as redwood is you could haul azz through it with a chainsaw .You'd probabley sneeze for the next three days though .

 

[Dave Shepard]

Made a mill mod today. I made a quick little bracket to hang a bucket off the sawdust chute. It filled up too quick, which I was expecting. I was going to make a bin that I could open with a function on the remote control that would dump into a vacuum port. For really big logs I would need almost 15 gallons of capacity, so I don't think it's going to work.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/tySbzAfTzdo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[MasterBlaster]

At least you tried!

 

[trx250r180]

my portable mill gets fairly good results

 

[SouthSoundTree]

I just got some western red cedar and port orford cedar delivered, and have elm slabs to pick up. NOW, to do something with them .

 

[woodworkingboy]

Don't you have to dry them?

 

[HolmenTree]

I got three 16 ft 30" -36" diameter white spruce logs to mill up into 12"x12" timbers for my chainsaw competition on Feb 15.
The 090AV and Alaskan36" are all ready to rumble but its gotta get warmer then 40 below windchill first.

 

[Porkbrick]

milled a bunch of deodor cedar with the lucas mill this weekend. 2x6s and 1x6s, joists and flooring for the loft in my cabin. my wife helped out

 

[rumination]

Sweet! I want one of those.

 

[Porkbrick]

this one belongs to a fellow tree guy in town and the deal is he leaves the mill at our yard for us to use in exchange for storing his logs/mill. pretty convenient for me!

 

[squisher]

No doubt!

Milling is satisfying work.

 

[woodworkingboy]

Cool arrangement. The guy where I'm cutting said to feel free leaving logs there whenever I need to in the future. The Walnut in the work photo I posted turned out to be in excellent shape and fine color.

I guess those Lucas mills can make a pass through a log pretty quickly. The slabs do pile up, but chain milling can be slow going.

 

[flushcut]

Sweet deal!

 

[SouthSoundTree]

Oh God is chainsaw milling slow by comparison, unless maybe it two big sawheads.

Went over to my miller's place back through the wood as the crow flies. He loads his one-ton with his backhoe forks and drives it over for me to unload. I'm getting quite the supply of wood with which I don't know what I'll do. A deck and perhaps a guest cabin or gypsy wagon. make some money on airbnb.com.

He was cutting me some fenceboards from small cedar when I returned the truck. I'm hoping he'll load some elm slabs that we split 50/50 with me paying for haul to his yard. Maybe an okay deal. If the elm turns out to be no good, I'm only out $100 for hauling, and I'll have firewood, but I'm hoping for something cool. Its wingbark elm. Dunno? He's flat-sawn it all. Got some redwood slabs.

He has a pile of redwood logs, couple thousand board feet. He's cut redwood siding for his mill building.

He made a nail-lam beam for his building. Not glue-lam. Said he used some spacer to build a crown in the beam and just kept nailing short sections of waste 2x6, or 2x8 into a beam 30' long or so.

 

[SouthSoundTree]

Don't you have to dry them?

were you asking me, Jay?

I'll sticker and dry them in my barn.

 

[squisher]

Chainsaw milling is a labor of love for certain. I haven't milled since the summer. With just a 66 powerhead it's pretty slow.

 

[HolmenTree]

Stihl 090 , 880 or 3120XP motor along just fine. The trick is you gotta know how to hand file.........would be really slow if you had to put on a new pre sharpened chain every half hour. Ha ha.

 

[woodworkingboy]

I used one of those Grandberg sharpening units when I first got into milling, the round abrasive things that you push back and forth with the device mounted on the bar. Powered by battery. It works reasonable. In Malloff's book, he shows a small device similar to one of the Italian or Oregon type chain grinders that has the pivoting arm, except it is made to mount on the bar. It looks really cool, but enquiries seemed to inform that the outfit that made that went out of business for some reason.

 

[HolmenTree]

Jay, it doesn't take a lot to keep an edge on a sawchain for milling filing free hand, wih just a couple of light strokes per cutter.
Depending how clean the logs are you can get by with a quick 5 minute touchup with the file every half to one hour of steady milling.
With my Alaskan I have to file both left and right hand cutters from the right hand side of the mill due to clearance issues. That means filing into the working corner of the right hand cutters .

 

[HolmenTree]

To add to my last post if some one can't comfortably hand file free hand , then chainsaw milling is not a good idea for them.

 

[woodworkingboy]

Willard, I agree. I was more thinking that if someone wanted to do milling and felt that they weren't confident with hand sharpening, the mechanical contraptions offer something. Chances are at some point they would move to the more convenient hand method, that seems like the natural evolution. If you are regularly hitting something like some marker plates that were in some orchard trees that I had access to, in every tree, I think that a sharpening device could be useful. i didn't have one with me, and I learned that even by hand, you can almost use up a brand new chain in a day. it was terrible, so frustrating.

 

[squisher]

I hand file. Even though I have a Oregon grinder I never use it.

 

[HolmenTree]

I hand file. Even though I have a Oregon grinder I never use it.

Well Justin in that case if you want to put a smile on your face while chainsaw milling, you need to get a bigger displacement saw.
I just use my 066 and 395XP for ripping lumber off of precut cants from my Stihl 090AV.

 

[rumination]

What angles are you guys using on your ripping chains?