The walnut tally is in

[Fred Voorhees]

I harvested all of the walnut out of that tree that I procured over the last few days and got it home and sealed the ends with paraffin wax and got it stacked. Total count was 290 board feet. I beleive that walnut in our area is going for around $5 per board foot and at that, I am looking at $1,450 worth of walnut. Total cost outlay for the experience (sawyer, helpers, additonal concrete block for weighing down, paraffin wax and sticker material came to around $370. I ran out of sticker material and will have to pick up the rest tomorrow after work and stack the rest of the pile. Gene Hamilton of Doylestown,PA did the sawing. I got him through Mr. Becker. Gene is very knowledgeable about his craft and a great gentleman to boot. I had two massive pieces that I hope to get some nice crotch pieces from.

[Fred Voorhees]

Got the stuff home and began to treat the ends immediately with paraffin wax. And the stacking begun.

[Gary Herrmann]

Congrats Fred. I hope to do that myself with a couple silver maples soon.

[julie Graf]

very nice! I am jealous.

but - i did get some Tennessee walnut that has been sitting in my cousins barn for - he says - 30 years. (4/4) i'm planning on planing it this week.. if its nice i'll post some photos!

[Jim Becker]

Looks great, Fred. You'll enjoy working with that walnut once it's ready to go.

[Dewey Torres]

Nice haul aside... is that your place in the pics where the mill is set up? It looks like a golf course (beautiful).

[Fred Voorhees]

Nice haul aside... is that your place in the pics where the mill is set up? It looks like a golf course (beautiful).

Dewey - no, not my place. It's the grounds of the high school where my wife works in the business office. Just off of one of their soccer fields.

[Steve Clardy]

Looks good Fred.

Treat the log ends before sawing next time.

Lots quicker than treating each board end.

[Richard M. Wolfe]

Nice haul, Fred. Like Steve said, if you can coat the ends of the logs before milling and as soon after hitting the ground as possible. I've coated some stuff that was already stuck and beginning to check and don't think it did any good. Once the checks start it's very difficult to get sealer in them. Consequently I had cracks in this stuff (chinaberry) that ran for two feet.

[Loren Bengtson]

Fred (and others),

Logs that are intended to be sawn into lumber should be end-coated as soon as possible after the log is sawn to length. If you wait a week after the tree is felled you won't lose too much lumber to splitting, but sooner is better. If a month has gone by, you are mostly wasting your time and material.

You can use parafin, as Fred did, or you can buy commercially available end-coat. I don't know if it's available in smaller quantities, since I buy mine in five-gallon buckets, but it's not terribly expensive even if you have to buy five gallons. It will almost certainly save you the cost of the end-coat in the lumber you recover.

You can get it from Bailey's, a logging supplier, or from UC Coatings. A Google search should yield results.

Good luck,
Loren

[Frank Drew]

Loren,

At least some of the commercial green wood sealers are available by the gallon; Craft Supplies, among others, sell their generic product that way.

Fred,

Excellent, and thanks for the photos; you'll be very happy with your wood when you eventually work it up.

[Michael Conner]

Fred,

Thanks for posting this thread. I am a hobbiest sawmiller/woodworker and I appreciate the way you look at the deal you got on your lumber. Many people talk with sawyers and think that the price is high for the sawing rather than looking at the value of the product.

I am oftened amazed that people will want me to saw framing lumber that could be purchased from a borg for not too much cash. I could saw the saw logs into 1xs (or something not so common as framing lumber) and the value of their final product would be much higher. My pay would be the same either route.

Anyway, that is a fine haul of walnut. I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

Mike