A day out getting slabs milled

[MF1000]

Been out most of today getting some of my stored up slabs on a mill - found a great guy in Lancashire … Treecycle2020 aka Keith who has a portable mill and two Alaskan chainsaw mills that can cut up to 5ft boards.

Took my slabs of oak, beech and chesnut


beech slab 2400 x 900 x100

so the 6 ft bar came out

unfortunatly it was too twisted to use this mill so we had to slip the sides off an created two 600mm wide 40mm thick planks on the portable mill but they still look very good


oal slab on the portable mill


nice slice of beech


I’ll post up more pics of the planks once I’ve unloaded my wife’s van tomorrow.

Keiths a great guy to work with and he has a stock of timber he’s milled over the past two years too.

 

[guineafowl21]

I’ve been involved in some wood-mizering recently, and have my own small Alaskan mill. Unless you particularly want two waney edges, I’ve found it’s best to mill a flat, then turn 90deg and start slabbing. That way, all your boards have a flattish edge that your machines can work from. It’s also easier to run the chainsaw along a flat edge.

Another piece of advice from the WM man was to seal the end grain after slabbing, either with dilute PVA, or, as he suggested, use up all those nearly-empty tins of paint that everyone has stored away.

Oh, and mark a date on the stacks. You think you’ll remember how long they’ve been there…

 

[MF1000]

The slabs being milled were all seasoned and when checked during milling were between 11-14% moisture

as promised here are some pics

Beech - 2 slabs of 2400 x 580 x 40mm ….the original 100mm thick slab had twists & bows so the best plan was to take the live edges off then cut it into the two slabs. Still some lower spots down to 30mm but far easier to work with now.



Chestnut - 2 slabs of 2500 x 5-700 x 45 mm



Oak 3 slabs 2450 x 250-300 x 25



Beech 2 slabs 2400 x 400 x 28



lots of material to now work with and or sell a few bits on

 

[MF1000]

Spent a couple of hours today with the Wolf belt sander and 60 grit roughing off some of the saw marks to get a better picture of what the milling has revealled.

here are the two 45mm thick beech slabs on the bench in a book fold arrangement


I’ve trimmed off the top edge that was partially split during the shorter use of the Alaskan mill. Still 2m long and after removing some thinner material on the top LHS a width of 850mm could be achieved.

After a quick run over with 120 grit here is the grain shown with some white spirit

Some nice ‘character’ features.

On to the chestnut …I just roughed 1 piece


And a close up of the figuring



The other two pieces that I though were beech I think are Ash after sanding one if them


and finally some nice rippling on the single slice of oak