"More about the lumber" or "The mother of all oaks"

So Jeremiah has worked with a lot of lumber getting ready to build his house. He has spend a lot of time cutting down trees, dragging them out of the woods, preserving them until they are sawed into lumber and then storing the lumber so it dries without any problems.

To tell the tale of the lumber, I will tell the tale of one tree from start to where we are now (not quite the finish yet). Up the hill from where I will be moving my house there are a lot of big trees, and as they die we harvest them for lumber. One such tree that died last year was a big red oak. Now, I have seen bigger trees before, so I won't say it was the biggest red oak that I have ever seen, but it was definitely a big tree.

Jeremiah started by felling a hickory that was probably going to be in the way when the oak came down, and then started to work on the oak. After about 30 minutes (at least) of cutting wedges out of the tree it started to move. Now the tree was over 40 inches in diameter, and the chain saw bar is only 20 inches long, so it requires a lot of cutting to get through the center of a tree this size. If care is not taken to make sure the center is properly cut, a lot of wood can be lost or even worse the tree can do very unpredictable things as it falls.

As Jeremiah cut and cut, I watched the limbs of the tree to make sure that the vibrations of his cutting didn't bring any down (even a 10 pound limb falling from 40 feet up can be dangerous, not to mention a 1000 pound branch). Eventually the tree started to lean and the cutting stopped - for a minute. The tree creaked and then settled to a new position, so it was back to cutting. After a couple such pauses, the tree slowly leaned past its breaking point and the last few fibers holding to the trunk slowly gave way. An uncut hickory in the way turned to splinters as the oak plowed through it, and even some of the smaller limbs at the top of the oak tore into a massive poplar. As the trunk crashed in to the ground the earth shook with a magnitude that rivals the frequent blasts at the nearby limestone quarry. Leaves and branches fell off of trees all around as each living tree gave up its offering to the long dead, but now fallen elder of the forest.



At its base, the tree was 38 inches across, and its trunk was straight for 28 feet, finally branching out at a diameter 30 inches. We decided that a 16 foot section from the trunk would be best, based on a slight curve at this point in the tree. After much additional sawing, this piece was finally cut. Now to get it off the hill.

Originally the plan was to hook the tree to the back of the tractor and drag it down the hill. The hardest part, though, would be that we had to go back up part of the hill to get to a safe way down the hill. To give you an idea of how steep this hill is, we have yet to be able to drive a vehicle forwards up the hill due the grade. Every trip up the hill has to be made in reverse as about halfway up the hill the front wheels of any of our equipment have come off the ground.

Even dragging the tree up the first part of the hill which was not too steep of a grade proved to be too much for the tractor to handle, forwards, in reverse, using the bucket; nothing worked! Jeremiah eventually came back up the hill another way and pushed the tree part of the way down the hill via another route. Its roll down the hill was unfortunately halted by a large tree (a hickory, I think) which refused to yield, even in the face of a log that probably weighed over 6 tons. (Note to self, this is a good reminder of what happens when a car hits a tree; normally the tree refuses to yield.)

Fortunately, with the log in this position, Jeremiah was able to endcoat the logs, the next step along the way. We paint the end of the logs with aluminum paint so that they do not dry unevenly. Normally the moisture escapes from the end of a log much faster than from the outside of a log where the tree's natural "skin" keeps most of the moisture in. This uneven drying of the log results in major cracking and destressing of the log, which in turn reduces the yield of the lumber. Once the log was lying against a tree, both ends were accessible and the log was endcoated.

A few weeks later, we had rented a track loader and we decided to see how it would handle the hill and if it could move some of the timbers off the hill. Not surprisingly it had no major difficulty getting up the hill (in reverse of course), but it struggled with the mother log nonetheless. After using chains and cables, pushing and pulling, Jeremiah and the loader were finally able to get the log unstuck, and with a lot of work, were able to get it down the hill.

When Mark Hinds brought his saw mill out, Jeremiah and I asked him if he could work with a log that big. The maximum width board his sawmill can handle is 24 inches, so it would require taking slabs off the outside of the log until it was finally down to a manageable size. Although I was not present for the sawing of the log, Jeremiah and Mr. Hinds were able to get the log onto the sawmill with the help of the big farm tractor. Unfortunately the weight of the log pushed the supports for the sawmill into the ground, so it had to be reset to level.

After a long day of work, Mr. Hinds and Jeremiah finally had the log cut into lumber, resulting in some of the most beautiful wide plank red oak that I have ever seen. Jeremiah and I took the lumber, trimmed the ends and recoated them, and then stacked and stickered them so that they would dry evenly. When it comes time for Jeremiah to use the lumber in building his house, there will be many more steps involved, but for now the boards are sitting and drying.