Welcome to the CT Logs To Lumber, LLC web log (blog). Here we post notes and pictures about some of our milling jobs, and other significant events in the life of our sawmill and business. Feel free to poke around and see what we've been up to.
Report for October 2011
Monday, October 31, 2011
As I hinted at at the end of the September report, Kim and I took a vacation in October. Specifically, we spent two weeks on the road. We started on October 1st, heading down the coast to Chincoteague Island, VA. From there we traveled to Charleston, SC, and then turned inland to Asheville, NC. Then we headed back north along the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was all very pleasant, and a welcome break.
But, back to work:
- We went to Old Lyme for the first time to mill a nice big oak log.
- We milled for two customers on the same day down in Fairfield county; one in Wilton, and one not too far away in Weston. The customers are friends, and the original plan was for them to bring their logs to one location. But that didn’t work out, so we moved the mill instead of the logs.
- We went to a customer in East Hartford just off Silver Lane on two different days milling pine and oak.
- We milled a couple of oak logs into beams to be used in the restoration of an old farmhouse in Cheshire. Of course, first we had to pull the logs out of the gulch they were lying in. Space was tight, but we managed to get it done. Wet snow started to fall about half way through this job, so we were glad when time came to pack up and head home. The trip home through the snow was uneventful, but by morning wet snow falling on trees that hadn’t yet lost their leaves had resulted in limbs falling everywhere. We were without power and internet for a week, as was much of the rest of Connecticut.
September Doings
Friday, September 30, 2011
What we did:
- Returned to a property in the Gilead section of Hebron with the sawmill to mill about 10 logs into boards.
- Worked with an artist in Thompson to make the raw material for his creations. We milled red and white oak, pine, spruce, hickory, ash, and a log the customer thought might be cottonwood. He mostly makes small boxes, so he wanted a lot of thinner material, some of it under 1/4″.
- I milled a black walnut log from a tree damaged by hurricane Irene in a driveway in East Hartford. The customer got the log for the trouble of taking it away. He was very happy with the lumber, and had a special project in mind.
- A customer brought 5 small to mid-sized red oak logs to my home in the back of his pickup truck. Getting the logs out of the back of his pickup truck took a bit of head scratching and my Kubota tractor. The logs were milled into random width 1″ boards.
- I took the sawmill to Westport and milled a few large diameter oak logs from a tree that hurricane Irene brought down. The customer wanted boards “as wide as possible”, and ended up with a good sized pile of 24″ wide lumber as well as some less wide.
- Milled one very nice white oak in Roxbury.
- Did a sawmill demonstration again at the Coventry Regional Farmer’s Market.
- Milled some logs from trees taken down for a construction project at a home in Wilton.
- Went to Southbury to mill three logs from a tree that went down during hurricane Irene. The tree landed on a swing set that was not up to the challenge.
- Started exploring the possibility of making rustic slab benches. The sawmill makes parts of this easy, but other tools are required, as well as some practice.
We seem to be getting more and more busy, but next month we’re taking a vacation.
August Activity Report
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
We started August by doing something we’ve never done before. We took the sawmill to Rhode Island for the first time; North Smithfield to be exact. We were there to mill some butternut logs, which was also a first.
Other jobs in August included:
- The gentleman who brought me the 4″x6″ pressure treated timbers to saw in half in July brought me some more in August. Apparently he miscalculated his needs.
- I went to Killingworth to mill one large oak log, and made some very nice looking boards.
- I took the sawmill to East Hampton to mill some cedar logs that had been sitting too long. We did get some lumber, but there was also a lot of rotten wood. Ants will move into cedar logs if you let them sit long enough.
- I spent 4 days in Woodbury milling oak and pine for a small but growing vineyard that has plans to become a winery. They had just poured the foundation for the building that will eventually be their tasting room. They needed a lot of beams and boards, including some beams longer than the 21′ Wood-Mizer says is the longest my mill can produce. We did some creative milling to produce those.
- I spent about half a day on a farm in East Hartford milling old telephone poles into planks to be used as the deck of a new bridge.
- And right after hurricane Irene blew through I spent two days back at the estate in Somers. Once again we milled a lot of logs of a variety of species and there was plenty of support equipment and help on hand. When we broke for lunch on the first day the man in charge told me to get into his estate vehicle (kind of like a golf cart), and he took me to see what had been done with some of the lumber I had milled during my prior visit.
It’s a little covered bridge; about 8′ wide and 12′ long. There’s a real brook under it. I was told that all the lumber used to build it came from my sawmill except for the wood shingles on the roof.
Let’s see how September unfolds…
Jobs in July
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Using the logging arch to pull a log out
We started out July with a bang. We were called to an estate in Somers, CT to mill a big pile of logs. We spent the better part of 4 days there and produced over 4,000 bdft of lumber from pine, hemlock, oak, hickory, and cedar logs. The man in charge was 96 years old I was told. He oversaw the operation, and he knew what he wanted. There was equipment for moving the logs to the mill, and plenty of help for pulling lumber and slabs off to go to the stacks or the big chipper. It was quite an experience, and I expect to be back.
Other jobs included:
- A gentleman who brought some pressure treated 4″x6″ timbers to my home to have me saw them in half. He said that he tried to do this on his table saw, but it was a lot of work, and the results were not so good. It was quick work with a bandsaw mill.
- I went to Stamford to mill some oak logs that had been down for several years. It would have been better to have milled them sooner, but there was still a lot of good lumber in them. The logs needed to be pulled out of an area almost completely surrounded by stone walls. The only path out was between two tangled forsythia bushes. Fortunately there was an appropriately located tree to attach a snatch block to, and I was able to use the logging arch and my truck to pull the logs out into the open (picture above).
- I returned to a customer in Ellington for a day to mill about 1,900 bdft of pine into boards and beams he hopes to sell.
- A cherry tree that was threatening to fall on a garage in West Hartford was taken down, and I was called on to mill it into boards. Space was very limited, but I managed to squeeze the sawmill in and make some lumber.
- A man in Roxbury, CT had some outdoor projects on his to-do list, and ordered a truckload of black locust logs from somewhere in upstate New York. Black locust is very rot resistant and suitable for use outdoors, but is not very common in Connecticut. Unfortunately, the logs delivered were small and crooked. I spent a day trying to make the lumber the customer wanted from the logs he had with only partial success.
- During my career as a computer programmer, I worked for a company based in Hopkinton Massachusetts for several years, so I didn’t need my GPS to help me for most of the way to a customer who had had a failing oak tree taken down. We spent a good part of the day milling lumber and managed to finish packing up just before a big thunderstorm hit the area.
- Finally, we went to Wales, MA to mill some large diameter pine logs. Somehow during the process the drive belt for the alternator got shredded. I had a spare in the truck, but I’d never changed that belt before, and it took a while to figure out how to get the new belt on. We still managed to mill over 2,000 bdft of lumber before the end of the day.
See you next month…
What We Did in June
Thursday, June 30, 2011
We kept pretty busy in June…
- We spent a day in the Gilead section of Hebron milling ash, pine, oak, maple, and birch.
- We spent a little over an hour in Naugatuck milling a pair a nice cherry logs that yielded about 130 bdft of lumber.
- We milled a very nice walnut log in Enfield produced about 500 bdft of very pretty boards.
- We traveled up to Holden, MA to mill several very old factory timbers into boards.
- We milled almost 1000 bdft of pine into dimensional lumber in a back yard in Ashford.
- A day on a business property in Durham resulted in over 1,700 bdft of oak and maple lumber.
- A few hours milling overlooking a pond in Ashford produced about 300 bdft of walnut boards.