Felling Trees for Cutting Lumber

Felling Trees

First of all, Kevin will be writing an article soon on the maintenance of Oscar and the things we learned from sawing hardwoods. For now though, we're still contenting with the weather, so milling time has been minimized.

Last weekend, we felled eight large pine trees. Kevin then bucked them to length and we ended up with 32 one hundred inch logs. Using BoardCalc, we figure we have a tad over 5000 pounds of logs waiting to be dragged to the loading ramps of the sawmill.

With any luck, we'll be up and at it early on Saturday morning, getting those logs into place. With everything that we've learned from the past, we're hoping that we can up our output enough to get them all boarded out by sometime Sunday afternoon.

They are calling for a slight chance of rain this weekend also, but I'm hoping that if it does rain; it all happens at night or down south or something. Getting a roof over Oscar is becoming more and more important as now we're trying to beat the worst of the sap rising in the pines. Both of us figure that once late April and early May arrives, the pines will be too sticky with resin to work with comfortably.

Yet, as with all things about this project - it's one thing at a time. Baby steps really, but that's how we both learn. That and reading every trade magazine and every board I can find on sawing, lumber, milling and about every other aspect of this business.

Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself that we've only had Oscar up and running for about three months. Since I knew nothing, other than what I had researched, before we started this project, I have to step back and tell myself - You've come a long way, baby! Six months ago, I couldn't have told anyone what a board foot was, let alone how to calculate one. (And yes, I can do it now without BoardCalc.)

So, stay tuned. There's a lot more to come.