The lumber mill that wasn't

Thanksgiving is my favourite holiday of the year. I like it better than all the others put together. Nobody has managed to ruin the simple beauty of this set of traditions: spend time with family and friends, work a little, relax a little, eat well, and be thankful. It's like the one day a year dedicated to doing what we should do every day.

Anyway, I celebrated in my own particular way: trying to turn a pair of Norway spruce trees in my parents' backyard into useful lumber. The endeavour was ultimately unsuccessful, but it turned out to have been well worth the work anyway. Here's what happened:

My folks had decided to have these two trees cut down because they were shading their pool, and dropping enough needles to make cleanup a major hassle. They live in a very heavily wooded area, so although I did advocate for the trees being kept, this wasn't exactly clear-cutting. And as it turned out, they were pretty young (and an introduced species, after all!) so this was not a tragedy, even by my tree-hugging standards.
Nevertheless it was my intention to save what I could. Firewood is a noble enough end, but lumber is better. The arborist who did the felling left me three 12-foot logs from a knotty tree and a clear tree, and I figured I could get lumber out of at least one of them, possibly enough to make board & batten siding for the back of my house.

So I armed myself with a chainsaw mill, also known as an Alaska mill, which enables an ordinary guy like me to mill logs into lumber with a little effort and know-how. Or at least, it can. It didn't work out for me, although I followed all the right steps: rented a mean-looking chainsaw, had a ripping chain made for it, took the time to make a level plane across the top of the first log using a 12-foot 2x10, slabbed the log all around to make it roughly square, and started milling.

And then stopped, about a foot in. For reasons that still aren't perfectly clear, my dad, my buddy and I just couldn't get the saw to mill its merry way through that log. I think the log was too big, (I cut it down to about 11 inches square) for a 16-inch saw. I also think that the mill didn't sit as level on the 2x10 as I had hoped, so that the saw wound up binding. I actually thought I saw some metal in the kerf as well, which wouldn't have done any favours for my custom ripping chain, but no one else saw it and when I looked again I couldn't see it either! Whatever the case, the damned thing wouldn't budge.

That was on Sunday. Monday, I went out and tried again, this time with the benefit of a good night's sleep and a belly-full of turkey. But still no dice. So the decision was made: firewood it must be. The logs had to be dealt with, that was the arrangement with the folks. So with a bit of a heavy heart I started in on the smaller logs, my dad holding a 16-inch board jig as Icut them into stovelength rounds. Mind you, I love doing firewood, but lumber is better...

Anyway, I had saved the the log I had roughly squared off for milling, til last, figuring I might come up with a suitable use for it before I had finished cutting the others. And sure enough... after a little bit of speculation about what might be done to save a bit of the tree and the effort, my mom agreed a bench would be just the thing. And so success was born of failure... by the end of the afternoon on Monday, my folks had a really big pile of firewood-sized rounds, I had two rough-milled boards 1 X 16 x 16 inches long, a chunk of spruce I had "carved" with the chainsaw just for the heck of it, and where the clear tree once stood, there was quite a substantial rough-hewn bench just right for resting on after two days work. My dad and I sat on it and rested in our matching Beaver Lumber sweatshirts. Job well done.

And as I fell asleep last night, I could clearly see in my mind about 10 different things a guy might do with stove-length spruce round, including turning them on a lathe, slicing them into shingles, turning them into flowerpots, carving Buddhas out of them... just about anything, in fact, but firewood. Happy Thanksgiving, eh?