My arborist friend was removing a 29" diameter red oak that blew down in a big wind storm we had a couple of weeks ago. Miraculously, it mostly missed a camp and some outbuildings and fell right on the road between them. The bottom of the trunk was pretty rotten, which is likely why it came down, but the top 20 feet of the main trunk were solid so he called to ask if I wanted it. Yes, of course, thank you, but I'm not sure I can transport them as my trailer only has a 2000 lb capacity and each of these 8' logs were going to come in around 2300 lbs. No worries, he said, we'll have a good sized trailer and a Bobcat to load them with. Wow, terrific, thank you.
Here he is getting the second log up onto the back of the trailer.
And then lifting and pushing it on.
They dumped the logs on my lawn and I tried picking one up with my log dolly, only to have the 2000 lb winch strip out. I have a two line set up on it so it should be able to pick up a lot more than 2300 lbs but it failed. OK, now what? My mill has a 30" diameter limit so I knew it was going to be a bear to handle it anyway, so I decided to quarter the log first with my chainsaw. Of course that wasn't the easiest task but I got it done. I had forgotten how heavy that 85 cc saw with a 28" bar is but remembered pretty fast after 15 or 20 minutes. Anyway, with a new winch on the log dolly I transported the quarters out to my mill and set about trying to rig them for quarter sawing. It wasn't all that hard.
I have a winch to roll logs up onto the mill. It worked equally well to drag the log quarter up the ramps. Once on the deck I used it to rotate the quarter against the back support, using a plywood gage cut at 45° to tell me when it was positioned properly. The log clamps had no trouble keeping it in the right orientation. I took a few boards off the top, then rotated the remaining section of the quarter onto that flat face before cutting the rest of the boards.
Pretty easy all in all. More to follow.
John