Converting a Walnut log

Walnut is a favourite for …

… many woodworkers due it its figure, colour and the finish. I also like it a lot as it’s a good earner and I can pretty much sell every bit unlike other woods.

So selling is a doddle, the hard bit …

… is finding it. If you’ve been reading my blogs for the 20 years apart from needing medical help you’ll have seen the many and various places we have extracted it from. Often in back gardens the only way is to chainsaw mill it and lug it out in slabs. The other issue with garden trees is they often have had nails from long forgotten bird boxes and the like

 

The one pictured below went on a trailer but was too heavy for my old tractor to lift it off so it went to my mate Ant’s yard

I had to buy myself these chains

Ant’s 1970s digger and top quality chains …

… had it lifted and placed gently on the bandsaw with no effort from us. If you’d struggled with winches, bars and crap cranes as often as I had you’d enjoy watching it happen!

There’s a bit of fettling before milling

Once on the saw it’s a question …

… of what sizes and often I’ll go for a mix of 1, 2 and maybe a 3″ slab but on this occasion I went for all 2″.  The 2″ are cut a quarter of an inch thicker than that or if you aren’t a dinosaur like me and have converted to metric 54mm. A log like this takes a couple of hours from start to finish allowing for offloading on to the trailer and a slurp or two of tea

It’s better when the sun comes out!

Watching the saw auto feed through …

… the logs is the easy bit, a little harder lifting them on to the trailer below. A lot harder but important is to stack them correctly at the woods with the right amount of stickers and covered to allow air flow for the next couple of years but keep rain and destructive sunlight which causes checking on most hardwoods