OK, OK, so it’s a gloat. Thought I would post some pics from one of the latest wood episodes. I will confess that I didn’t get in on but very little of the action. The guy I work with is a lot younger and stouter than me and I was at work most of the time…at least that’s my excuses for now.
Several months ago a lady contacted us about a pecan that was to come out as it was in the way of some bridge construction at a small town near here. The first pic is her at the base of the tree. Do we want it? You bet we want it! Er, um, what now ? It was nearly six feet across the base. Got it down courtesy the bridge crew who dug most of the base out with an excavator they were using on the bridge so we got trunk actually below ground, then got it sectioned and borrowed a heavy trailer to get the main trunk home. Some statistics – we were able to get weights as a scale was close. The main trunk was for the most part about 4 ½ feet across and over 18 feet long and weighed over 6 ¾ tons. Total log weight of “millable” stuff something over sixteen tons.
The trunk sat in the yard on billets for several months and shed the bark while we hemhawed over what to do. Wesley finally climbed on top, scored a line and cut through as much as he could with a Stihl with a three foot bar. Turned it with a high lift jack and finished the cut, which took five tanks of gas.
The second pic is him cutting it into manageable nine foot long quarter sections. We were able to get the quarters on the mill and sliced into boards and used the 4/4 scale, which is about 1 1/8 in. The gloat now: The trunk was solid (on an old big tree it’s likely to be pithy or hollow) and yielded a bit over 1,000 bd ft of the prettiest salmon red pecan I’ve ever seen- pecky with lots of dark red streaks running with the grain the length of the boards. Very few knots. The third shot is cutting twenty inch boards from a cant; a total of 33 of them along with all the other stuff. (Guess what size my planer is). Only metal in the trunk was one bullet deep in the wood. Still have most of the top to do…some of the branches are better than two feet in diameter.
We’re running out of a place for stuff – a good dilemma to have, I guess. The trunk plus two other pecan, a 28” and a 32”, have filled and are drying in a forty foot container and there is more to mill, and not just pecan. Just milled about 500 ft of eastern red cedar (one of them made some twenty inch boards…but not 33) with about 1,000 ft in logs left to go and on top of that he just brought home a two foot bois d’arc yesterday. Now my part. We could have the tree if we made the lady something from the wood. If it dries OK it should be a pleasure.
[ATTACH][ATTACH]20 inch boards.jpg[/ATTACH][/ATTACH]
Well the pics didn't download as I expected, but you get the idea.
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