How to crack a walnut with your WM and other nutty things

WV Sawmiller · February 21, 2017, 06:38:02 PM

Yesterday i discovered a new trick - how to crack a walnut with a WM sawmill. As you can imagine the hard part is the clamping. To assist with this there are several steps you must take.
1. Place the walnut carefully in the fork of a growing walnut tree.
2. Protect it from squirrels and birds until the tree completely grows around the nut - this is a critical step.
3. Allow the tree to grow for another 30-40 years.
4. Cut the tree
5. Buck the log to the desired length
6. Place the log on the mill and square off both sides.
7. Position the height of the band on your mill to perfectly center the nut being held in its organic clamping system.
8. Carefully saw through the exact center of the nut such that there are equal halves on both sides.

Voila!

I went over and picked up the rest of the walnut I sawed yesterday including 2 - 4"X5' native edge pieces I cut for benches.

When I unloaded the truck and brushed some of the sawdust of the bench slabs I noticed that I had sawed a walnut perfectly in half such that it shows on both pieces.

I cleaned and stacked the 4/4 lumber on my recently completed shelves pretty well filling them.

I anchorsealed the ends and both sides of the cookies and stacked them finishing filling the other new shelf.

Speaking of nutty things - I broke the end off an extension cord so bought and installed a new end. I think I better stick with sawmilling as I will never make it as an electrician.

Kbeitz · February 21, 2017, 07:13:34 PM

Don't feel bad ... You can use that on your generator to back feed you house.

Magicman · February 21, 2017, 07:14:52 PM

Now you are a genuine "nut cracker".

BigZ La · February 21, 2017, 07:17:13 PM

Your not the first electrician to do that :D

Ga Mtn Man · February 21, 2017, 07:27:03 PM

Nice job on cracking that nut. It's good you have some skills to fall back on in case the electrician thing doesn't work out for you (and it isn't looking good for that).

paul case · February 21, 2017, 07:29:33 PM

Don't go pluggin that one in on both ends.

I wonder if the squirrels knew that one was a reject as it was empty.
I may want you to train ma a little more on steps #2 3 7 and8.

PC

WV Sawmiller · February 21, 2017, 08:57:14 PM

Kbeitz,

Nope, don't need the cord for that. I put in a Guardian/Generac natural gas powered GenSet with ATS switch many years ago to power most all of my house (Certainly the critical areas). When we have a power outage 10 seconds later my generator cranks itself and powers the house. Ran for 11 days 5 years ago when we had a Deratio that knocked out power to 5 surrounding states. Only time it shut down was once for me to change the oil and a couple times for me to check the oil.

In Iraq we built military camps using hootches built in Turkey, Dubai, etc. They had a big power plug in to power the hootches. We had one issue where the hootches all came with big female plug in points which meant the male end coming from the prime power source had 3 live, very hot exposed pins. We had to change that post haste.

Paul,

Yep, the squirrels likely knew. I had a buddy in Ala showing off his new Buck hunting knife he had sharpened to the point he said he could split molecules with it. We were squirrel hunting and the next time I saw him his thumb was bandaged in an old, now bloody, T-shirt. He was sitting under a hickory tree waiting for a tree rat, spotted a hickory nut that was partly open and took out his knife and tried to split it. Now any of us know when the end is splitting it is old and no good but that knife slipped right through and deeply sliced his thumb. Duuuhh.

If you like I will write up a complete training guide on how you execute steps 2, 3, 7 & 8 if you'd like. I will even offer you a big FF discount for the training.