Large Tooth Ironwood

[chet]

Our county fair has a small logging congress every year. One of the local equipment dealers always takes all the large tooth aspen cants left over from the sawing competitions back to his shop. Well today I tried to resaw some of these cants, some of them where more than a half dozen years old. I swear that stuff is petrofied.

[Jeff]

Dry aspen can be a challenge. Even with the circle mill.

[Kevin]

Chet;
Is that striped maple?
No, it's not come to think of it but I can't remember what species it is.
I had a piece here and it has rough bark.

[Percy]

Three Administrator posts in a row...... ;D ;D. Its a convention :D :D :D

Ive never cut dry Aspen before Chet but dry Sitka Spruce is about the orneriest stuff I ever cut. Since I got the LT70 , I just set the lubemizer thing to "puke" as lots of water, huge water seems to help bigtime. I dont know what kind of setup you have  but Ill bet water would help some.... ;D

[chet]

I tried da water thing. This stuff is just hard. Extremely hard.  :

[Norwiscutter]

Tie some bricks to em and then sink em in a lake for a year or two, that should soften em up...of course then they wouldn't be good for much would they...

[Kevin]

Ok, stop searching.
I found it ...and it's American Hop-Hornbeam (Ironwood)

http://www.domtar.com/arbre/english/p_ostr.htm

[chet]

Nope, ya didn't find it. But den ya kinda did.  ???   What I was cutting was plane ole Large Tooth Aspen. But try cuttin' dat DanG stuff when its dried out and you would swear you was cutting IRON. American Hop-Hornbeam ( Ironwood ) falls into dat same category.

[Mark M]

When I was a kid we used to have a barn made out of popple logs, it was about 100 years old. My friend and I figured we would rearrange some of the logs from one end and make us a platform to use for a fort. We got some big "dock spikes" that were about 12 inches long and tried to drive them into the log. Using a sledge hammer we were able to get one about half way in before we were too tired! I know just what you mean about being made of Iron.

[Corley5]

Dad's garage is framed and sheathed with big tooth/large tooth aspen.  It was built in the summer of 1977.  A few years ago we were going to put up some shelves ;D  We ended up drilling and screwing rather than nailing them up.  Good stuff to build with as long it's kept dry