This past weekend fellow Creeker David Keller NC and I hosted an event at my farm in North Carolina to mill up some quartersawn red oak slabs for "Roubo" style workbench tops.
I had a 14" thick, 48" x 72" red oak slab that I milled several years ago tucked away in the corner of my shop, and last December David and I offered to mill it into QS Oak workbench slabs for members of our local woodworking club. The resulting slabs came out around 24" wide and 4.5" thick.
My sawmill is a Peterson WPF model that can mill logs up to 5' in diameter, and David has a Granberg Alaskan chainsaw mill with a Stihl MS660 driving it. We used both mills, as the maximum width board/plank that I can yield w/o turning the log is 20".
In addition, I had a 50" diameter, 16' long red oak log sitting in my log yard which we set up to be milled for future thick bench tops. Because of the significant weight of the log (over 10 tons), I used a crane to set it into place. I'll probably mill it in the next week or so.
A number of members of our local woodworking club were on hand to assist, and we all had a great time.
Here are some photo's of the action:
Setting the slab up for milling:
Setting the slab.JPG
Splitting the 48" wide slab into two 24" slabs with a chainsaw:
cutting the slab in two.JPG
Setting one slab up on top of the other for milling:
Lifting the small slab.JPG
Making the initial cuts with my Peterson sawmill:
scott milling.JPG
Milling out the portion between the Peterson cuts with the chainsaw mill (David Keller NC is the one in red on the right).
xDavid and Gofor.jpg
One of the milled slabs:
Another slab.JPG
Picking up the 10 ton red oak log with a crane in order to move it into the sawmill:
Picking the log.JPG
Measuring and aligning the pith of the log parallel to the sawmill tracks and carriage.
Aligning the log 2.JPG
Any time that a bunch of woodworkers get together to make sawdust it is bound to be fun, and this event was no exception. It was even more rewarding since were were producing something that was extremely rare - 4" x 20+" wide plank quartersawn oak workbench tops!
David took one of the slabs home with him, and I look forward to seeing some photo's of the workbench that he makes from it.