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.
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…