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.
April Activities
Monday, April 30, 2012
Spring continues to unfold, and there are more logs to be milled.
- Milled about 10 good sized oak logs into mostly 1″ random width boards in Simsbury. We also milled out one 5″x8″ beam to be used as a fireplace mantle.
- I spent over 7 hours moving logs on a residential lot in Manchester. The logs were all from trees damaged by the October snowstorm and felled by a tree service. A lot of smaller branches had to be cleared out of the way to give us room to work. I towed the logging arch (illegally) behind the truck, and left the mill at home. Most of the logs were moved with the arch hitched behind the customer’s small garden tractor, but several of the larger logs needed my much more powerful (but much less maneuverable) truck. The logs are now in three rows waiting for the sawmill, but a milling date has not been set.
- I milled one log in Stamford. It was a walnut log from a tree damaged by hurricane Irene last fall. The log was almost 2′ in diameter and about 16′ long. We made some very nice looking lumber from it. Driving time down and back was about 4 hours. Time to set up the mill (with a manual 180 degree spin) and mill the log was about 90 minutes.
- I spent 4 hours in Tolland milling oak logs mostly into beams and dimensional lumber as part of a barn construction project.
- I had another close-to-home job in Bolton, where I milled one small and three large maple logs into 1″ and 2″ lumber.
- I took another trip to Fairfield county, this time to Fairfield itself, where I moved 6 white oak logs around a small yard to set them up to be milled. I used the logging arch together with the truck to do this, though the spacing was tight. I then milled the logs into 1″ boards for eventual use as flooring.
- In Mansfield, I spent about a day and a half milling cherry, oak, and pine. The cherry was all in small, short logs. The customer is working on a small sailboat, and want some pieces with natural bends. One of the pine logs was big enough to yield 9 6×6′s along with some 1″ side lumber.
- I milled spruce logs into beams and boards in Sharon. The job lasted most of 2 days. I was milling just a few feet from Rt 41, and several people stopped by to ask for business cards. That’s nice, but it’s a long drive to get to Sharon.
- I spent 2 full days with a customer in my home town of Coventry milling material for a new shed or barn. We were milling the remains of several large pine and spruce trees. The customer wanted 2×4′s, 2×6′s, 6×6′s, and 1″ boards. When I left, there were more logs, but also a promise of rain in the weather forecast, so the rest will have to wait for another day.
- I drove a short distance to Andover Lake to mill some big oak logs for a customer who mostly wanted material for flooring. There were some logs we didn’t get to, so we’ll be back sometime in May.
- I spent about a half day in Glastonbury milling 3 hickory and 3 oak logs into 4/4 and 5/4 boards. The logs were from trees damaged in our fall storms. The lumber will actually go to the customer’s father, who is the woodworker in the family.
- I returned to my Coventry customer for another 10 hours of milling. We milled out a few more 6×6′s,
and a whole bunch of 1″ material for siding. Some of those 1″ boards were 20″ wide. When we got to the last log the customer said he’d had an inspiration and wanted an octagon. No one had ever asked me for an octagon before. I milled the log down to a 14×14 with some bark on the corners. The customer decided that was too big. I reduced the cant to a pretty clean 12×12, and set this up on a corner so that it looked like a diamond. To find the location of the first octagon cut, I drew a horizontal line from corner to corner, then up 6″ from that line, and measured from that mark down to the mill bed, and came up with a rough estimate of 14 1/2″. So, the first and second corners were cut with the blade set at 14 1/2″, and the third and forth were cut with the blade at 12″, and the result looked pretty good. Later I calculated the correct blade setting for the first two corner cuts, and came up with 14.49″. Pure luck, I assure you.
March Musings
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Winter is over and the milling resumes.
- Our first post winter break job was not too big and not too far away. Eleven small to medium sized logs in Storrs, about a 10 mile drive. The logs were mostly black walnut, with some nice cherry, and one ash log from a tree taken down in the hopes that it was yet more walnut. Oops.
- Milled some oak logs for a woman who originally found me at the Coventry Regional Farmer’s Market, during my demo last fall. She had a pile of about 20 logs, most of which were of a pretty good size. At the start she asked if we would be able to get material for 200 square feet of flooring. When we were about 2/3′rds of the way through the pile, we had enough lumber for about 400 square feet of flooring, plus some 4×6′s and 4×4′s for the foundation of her stickered stack of lumber. She decided she had enough.
- I milled two black walnut logs for a gentleman in downtown Ellington. He’s a close neighbor of a customer we milled for last November. One of the logs was about 20′ long, which is always a challenge, the other was about 8′.
- Milled 3 smaller maple logs, mostly into 1″ boards in Tolland, about 2 1/2 miles from my home. We needed to pull them out of the woods and onto the lawn where I had set up the mill. Since the logs were small and the terrain was relatively flat, the homeowner and I were able to do this quickly using the logging arch with the two-man handle.
- Milled three big gnarly cherry logs in Madison into mostly 1″ boards, with some thicker pieces for the top and legs of a planned kitchen harvest table.
- I spent most of 2 days working in a field in Ellington turning oak logs into 1″ boards to be used for flooring. I enjoyed excellent weather and beautiful views.
- I spent a full week on a fruit and vegetable farm in North Smithfield, RI milling pine. We milled 6×6′s for a new building, a few 2×4′s for some project, a bunch of 2×2′s for tomato stakes, some 1/2″ stock for new apple boxes, and lots and lots of random width 1″ boards.
Winter Shutdown
Friday, March 9, 2012
As you may recall, during the winter of 2010/2011 we had a lot of snow. Storm after storm piled on foot after foot of the cold white stuff. I spent many hours digging out the sawmill and keeping it in running condition. But, not surprisingly – since everyone’s logs were under three feet of snow, the phone stopped ringing and the emails stopped coming, until sometime in March, when the snow melted and we were off and running once again.
So, even though I realized that the experience of the prior year was unlikely to be repeated in full, I decided that for the winter of 2011/2012 I would just mothball the sawmill and shut down the business. Naturally, it turned out that we would have the mildest winter in a very long time. Still, I don’t regret the decision at all. I had a fine winter vacation, and got a lot done.
I mostly worked on getting my workshop better organized. This is a major project that mostly involves the building of cabinets of one sort or another. I got off to a good start, but I’m nowhere near done, and I probably won’t have anything more to say about this until I am.
I also did a few small projects in the house, and I built a storage shed for sawmill ‘stuff’.
This is actually part of my workshop project since in order to organize my workshop I had to move all of my sawmill clutter somewhere else. It’s 4′ deep by 8′ wide, and mostly made from oak taken green straight off the sawmill. It’s not exactly beautiful, but it’s quite functional, and so far has done a good job of keep the ‘stuff’ inside dry.
December Doings
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Keeping busy as we approach the end of the year:
- We went all the way down to Greenwich to mill some walnut logs that had to be moved from a fenced yard out to the driveway. For the larger logs this involved the logging arch, some rope, and a pulley to redirect the pull. For the smaller logs, it was all grunt work.
- I spent a day and a half in the driveway of a home in Glastonbury milling a total of 20 logs. According to the log scales, this should have produced 2740 board feet of lumber. It was a pretty big pile.
- I milled oak logs from trees damaged in the October snowstorm in yet another driveway in West Hartford. Space a little tight. To get the mill situated so that the logs could be rolled onto the loading arms, I had to back the mill into the driveway, disconnect the truck, and then manually spin the mill 180 degrees.
- During November’s job in Old Lyme near Rt 1, a woman stopped by and asked for a business card saying she knew someone who needed my services. This eventually led to a call from a bit north in Lyme who had a walnut tree that was down. She wanted lumber for a kitchen renovation.
- I traveled up I-84 to Sturbridge, MA to mill 10 smallish logs into 1″ boards. The milling went without a hitch. Getting out required driving across a field, and even 4 wheel drive wasn’t enough to get me back onto solid ground. Fortunately, the customer had a small tractor that was able to provide the additional traction needed to save the day.
- In November I milled pine for a customer in Ellington for the third time. One of the guys doing the off-bearing had some logs on a property in a near-by town, but there was no place on the property to set up the mill. The solution was to bring the logs to Ellington where there’s lot’s of room for the mill. We spent about half a day milling his logs.
- We went up to Southboro, MA to mill some big old maple. The customer had an old house on a small lot, and therefor a narrow driveway, on a busy state highway near the center of town. I blocked traffic for a minute or two getting the sawmill backed down the driveway.
- I visited an estate in Roxbury, and spent the day milling good sized oak logs into lumber. There was plenty of help on hand, so things moved along pretty well.
- In yet another long trip down into Fairfield county, I went to Easton to mill logs from several trees that had been taken down. The only reasonably level spot for the mill was near the top of a hill. The logs were at the bottom, and they were in a ditch. With some effort, the logs were rolled out of the ditch, picked up by the logging arch, and pulled to the mill.
- I drove to Warwick, RI to mill some oak. The tree, which had been in the back yard, had come down in hurricane Irene. It had been a big tree, and it came down on the house causing considerable damage. By the time I arrived, all that was left was a few logs, the largest of which were still in the back yard. These were much larger in diameter than the official capacity of my logging arch. I was barely able to get them off the ground, and tore a path across the lawn pulling them out to the mill. They made some fine lumber though.
- Somewhere in Avon there’s a small house on a lot on a ridge that provides a view many miles to the west. The small house is being replaced by a big house. Unfortunately, this required the removal of a large oak tree. The homeowner was sad to lose the tree, but wanted to use the wood for a bar. It will be a bar I’d like to see. After working a huge log down to managable size, I cut it into slabs 4″ thick. Heavy.
This brings us to the end of 2011.
November 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
The year winds down, but the sawmill jobs pile up.
- We returned to a customer in Scotland for 2 days, milling hardwoods one day and pine the next.
- We went all the way up to Ashburnham, MA, near the New Hampshire border north of Worcester, to mill pine logs into boards and beams for a new shed.
- We spent a couple of hours in Hebron milling some logs from a black walnut tree brought down by hurricane Irene.
- We went to Cromwell to mill logs of a variety of species for a man I know only as ‘Lucky’.
- Milled ash and pine for a customer in Avon.
- We traveled to Ridgefield to mill a large white oak log from a tree that was victim to Irene. The log was a bit over 32 feet long, and after some discussion I bucked it into two 12′s and an 8. I decided that it was easier to move the mill than the logs, so we set up 3 times that day.
- We returned to a customer in Ellington for a third visit, milling pine into boards and beams.
- We went to Old Lyme, a stone’s throw from RT. 1, to mill logs on a lot being cleared for the construction of a medical office building.
- On Main St. in Ellington, we milled some maple logs from trees that were taken down to make way for a new garage/barn. We hit metal 3 times that day.
- We traveled to Suffield to mill some oak logs from trees damaged by the late October snow storm. A few small logs were moved to the mill by hand, but 4 large logs were moved by the logging arch and the truck.
I need to remember to take more pictures…