Earl Johnson is 85 and a retired shipwright out of the Bremerton Naval Shipyard…a gentleman who can tell ya about the days of coal-fired steam for sure. Earl lives on Hood Canal and needs to redo his wharf, so he chose the big Doug Fir right next to the house… the one getting bigger and bigger and making the Missus nervous.
Problem is, the fir is in a tight spot…room to drop it but no room to mill it in place…and it wouldn’t be economical to hire a self-loading log truck to haul it just a couple miles to a sawyer with a portable mill. The local Woodmizer and Timberwolf guys didn’t want to do it because there was no room for the machine required to load logs on the carriage. So Joe Emel, the friend and arborist who’s gonna fall it for Earl, shanghais me to bring in my Lucas ‘cause he knows it will mill them where they lay on the ground. I agree to do it because these men are friends and I can use some quartersawn doorjamb material.
So Joe and I fall the tree late one morning so I can break down my mill and move it to Earl’s place before it gets too dark.
Joe making the face cut in the 48” DBH fir...
Back cut started and wedges being driven…
Finishing the hinge …falling…
Exactly where I asked him to put it so there’d be room for the mill…as from here on out this wood can only be moved by hand. The two top sections on the left are light enuf to peavey out of the way.
I mentally compute where the lumber requirements will come from within the tree based on where the crooks in the bole are, the ring count and what stock is required. Generally, the rougher and knottier the log, the bigger the stock you should take from it. In this tree, we decide before bucking that the 6X6’s will come from the upper logs, the 2X9’s will come from the second log and 4/4 and 5/4 stock will come from the clearer lower log.
We buck them into the lengths Earl requires and I lay out, move the tops and set up the mill…by the time this pic was taken one of the rough tops had been cut into bearers and stickers and the center 2d log opposite to it had been jacked into the mill to produce the 2X9’s.
Joe, like most fallers here, prefers Husky saws with 36” bars. As my use is primarily bucking for the mill where I don’t use or carry it much, I have a bigger Stihl 046 with an aftermarket hop-up kit installed. Shortens engine life, but Stihl cylinder repair kits run only 50 bucks these days on Ebay, and I’m stocking up. For where you have to move logs by hand that are too heavy for peaveys, the trusty old 48” farm jack and the ancient 1950’s all-steel Homelite Zip with Lewis winch come out of war reserve. If you can tunnel under that log, you can wrap a winch or come-along cable around it, drive the hook in with your falling axe, and cross-haul it to roll it around.
Rolling the logs instead of simply setting them on bearers with the backhoe is heavy labor and slow, and another reason others turned it down was the slope that makes milling difficult. We couldn’t get either mill or log level…only a shallow enuf slope to make the job workable.
Cross-hauling with a winch is fast but a bit of a chore working alone. An easier but more strenuous method is rolling the log with the farm jack, kicking a wedge in as you jack to keep the 10,000-pound log from rolling back and breaking your leg. But the farm jack doesn’t like that much weight so get a good one if you are gonna do this.
Continued on Milling Earl's Fir Part Two
Copyright 2003 Bob Smalser
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