Another unusual project...

[Bill White]

Talk about MONSTER wood. Good grief!
Well done sir.
Bill

[Richard Wolf]

Nice wood and good job. Glad you and the wife are better.

[Scott T Smith]

Scott,
Glad you are healthy and working on some healthy size slabs!
Thanks for the pics. Beautiful machinery and slabs.

Did you design and make the slab mill?

Did you use double stickers with one tapered to level the stack?

Hi all, thank for your kind words and well wishes.

Andrew, the slabber is my own design. My original goal was to build something that I could use to quarter large logs for reprocessing on a band mill. The two most common commercially available slabbers only have a maximum 10" depth. I needed something that could go much deeper (in my case 20"), so I opted to build my own). With the 20" depth I can section a 60" log into thirds, and then split the outer 1/3 slabs into quarters for reprocessing on my band mill into quartersawn lumber. Thus it allows me to maximize my yield of quarter and rift sawn lumber from oversized logs.

I started with a spare carriage for my Peterson sawmill (this helped a lot in not having to come up with the up and down adjustment mechanism), and then designed / fabricated the rest. It's primarily built from aluminum with stainless steel fasteners.

I did about a third of the TIG welding on it, and a good friend of mine who is a nuclear certified welder did the rest.

Re the stickers, several years back myself and a friend went in together and bought some surplus zebrawood from a guy on craigslist. We resold the best stuff, but about 1/3 of it was heavily checked and unsellable. I had set it aside to use for siding on a chicken coop here on the farm, but we ended up resawing it into stickers for the slabs. Since the zebrawood boards were around 1-1/8" thick, we had to double stack them in order to be thick enough for the forklift forks. No taper on the stickers, as I want to encourage the slabs to dry flat.

[Scott Austin]

Scott, My wife was also sick around Christmas. A little less severe but, still on the scary side. Thanks for posting your sawyer adventures, I really find it interesting.

[Ted Calver]

Re the stickers, several years back myself and a friend went in together and bought some surplus zebrawood from a guy on craigslist. We resold the best stuff, but about 1/3 of it was heavily checked and unsellable. I had set it aside to use for siding on a chicken coop here on the farm....

Now that would have been a chicken coop to see!!

[julian abram]

Really enjoyed your post and photos, great woodworking story that most of us do not get to see very often. I'm sure your hard labors will pay dividends in the future with those beautiful slabs.

[ryan paulsen]

Thanks for the post. I recently had a sawyer with a portable Peterson come by and saw a couple logs for me, and it was a really cool experience. I can't imagine what it would be like on logs like you are sawing! It still amazes me seeing a log that very well could be firewood turned into something beautiful. Awesome.

[Chris Hachet]

That is impressive....I need to see you sometime next year for lumber when I build my second workbench...