I hate spruce

[pnyberg]

I cut mostly hardwood, which is just fine with me.  My standard blade is the WM 9°.  Initially I'd try to mill the occasional pine log with the 9° blades.  Sometimes it would work, but sometimes the results were pretty disappointing, so eventually I added 10° blades to my inventory.  I recently milled pine for a solid week, and was quite pleased with the cut quality using 10° blades.

About I week ago I had a customer with a couple of dozen "pine" logs.  I need to bone up on my log identification skills.  I loaded up the mill with a 10° blade and started attempting to make boards and beams.  The logs had been sitting a year or two (or maybe more).  The bark was falling off, and the lumber was light as a feather.  It was also wavy to an extent that was way beyond what I would consider acceptable.  I was using lube (water with 1 cup of Pine-Sol per 5 gallons), and the blade stayed pretty clean, but it just wouldn't track. 

When something's not working, it's time to try something else.  I was pretty sure that switching to a 9° blade wouldn't improve things, so I tried the only other blade configuration in my inventory, a WM 4° blade.  Cut quality did improve significantly.  Lumber still had more wave than what I would consider acceptable for oak, but I judged the lumber to be usable and I was out of options, so I finished the job this way.  I was working along a state highway, and a number of people stopped while I was milling.  Many wanted business cards, but one was the owner of a manual mill who just wanted to watch an LT40 do its stuff.  At some point during our short conversation he pointed to the logs and said "That's spruce, isn't it?".  I admitted that I wasn't sure. (BTW, the customer was not on site, I was working with a laborer.)

For the past two days I've been working with a customer just a few miles from my home.  He had two pretty big piles of softwood logs from trees taken down in the last few months.  The tree service had helpfully mostly segregated the logs by species.  The first pile the customer said he was pretty sure was white pine.  We managed to find a log with a small attached branch with long wispy needles attached, so that sounded right.  The second pile was clearly a different species.  The customer said the needles had been short like a Christmas tree, so I'm guessing my old friend spruce.

We tackled the white pine pile first.  I put on a 10° blade and things were going fine.  About 3 logs in we find one of the spruce logs.  It was right there in the way, so we loaded it up.  The difference in the cut quality was like night and day.  I hope never to make a 2x4 that ugly again.  The customer said he wasn't bothered, but I was.  Anyway, the rest of the logs in that pile were pine, and they milled up just fine.

When we moved on the spruce pile, I didn't even try the 10° blade, but switched to a 4° right away.  Again, the cut quality was much better than with the log milled with the 10° blade, but still there was more wave to the cut than I would like to see.  At the end of the day, the customer was effusive with his praise, so at least one of us is happy.  We didn't finish the second pile, and it was a rain day today (much needed rain), so there will be another day to take a whack at the spruce in a week or two.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the spruce logs had gobs of ooze leaking out of them and all over my mill.  I spent half an hour this morning before the rain started cleaning off the bunks and backstops with solvents and a wire brush.

I'm not sure if there's anything I can do to get better quality cuts in spruce.  Since I'm portable, I can't control which end of the log I saw into (not that I noticed that making any difference).  I also don't sharpen or set my blades, so I'm limited to the 'off the shelf' configurations from WM.  Pitch buildup does not appear to be an issue.  Blade tension was almost always north of the 'orange zone'. 

What's a poor sawyer to do?

Thanks for listening...

--Peter

[customsawyer]

I would give the 9° blades a try I think they have a different gullet shape and that might help. I have never cut spruce so can't add much other than to give it a try.

[Magicman]

Since I have never sawn Spruce, I can only be a sympathetic listener.   :-\   It will be interesting to hear what other sawyers do when encountering Spruce.

[ladylake]

If it's dry with the bark falling off and light you need lots of set.    Steve

[Dewey]

Spuce is a tuff one....  The longer it sits,  the harder to saw... I've sawed allot of it. My thoughts are  sharp saw blades and slower  feed rate through the log  and pray for the best !!!

[Dave Shepard]

Whatever happened to the two brothers from up north? I think one of them went by LT40HDD51. I think they ran 13º bands and they cut mostly spruce.

[POSTON WIDEHEAD]

I use the Woodmizer 10 degree. 99% of the logs I saw are LONG LEAF, LOBLOLLY, SHORT LEAF, VIRGINIA, WHITE, SPRUCE...all Pine.

The 10 degree works best for me on any Pine. When the blade is sharp, I'm sawing pretty fast. If the log is knotty as a Virginia Pine, is bad to be, I slow down a little to let the blade saw the knot rather than ride it.

Peter I could not help but smile reading about the "globs oozing" out of the logs.  That's something that gets all over my tracks everyday. As the temperature gets into the 80s and 90s, the OOZ gets worse. Looks like honey running out. I have to mix DIESEL and SOAP in my water (Thanks Danny) and flip the lube switch to let the lube run full time.

However, if you get a Pine log whatever variety it is and it is bone dry.....I do slow down a bit.

I guess there is different strokes for different folks but again, the 10 degree works best for me sawing Pine,

[SAWMILL BUDDY]

Yep, spruce sucks! I have 4 large spruce logs given to me and after sawing one I just pushed the the other three over the hill.

[redbeard]

Some spruce logs cut nice and easy then you get some you just cant get through.

 

[snowshoveler]

Wow...spruce is what everyone around here loves to saw.
Pine is avoided by most.
Myself I will saw pretty much anything I can get, right now its pine for me.
Regards Chris

[POSTON WIDEHEAD]

Yep, spruce sucks! I have 4 large spruce logs given to me and after sawing one I just pushed the the other three over the hill.

If I could do this with customers logs.....I would!   :D :D :D :D
Too funny SAWMILL BUDDY.

[Chuck White]

Spruce is a difficult log to saw primarily because there is such a veriation in hardness between the clear wood and the knots!

The blade will want to follow the knot.

I only use the 10° WM blade and set them at .025 +/_ .001 and when aproaching the whorl of knots, I just hold back on the sawhead a little until the blade is into the knots, then just let go until it reaches the next whorl.

AND, I really don't like to saw spruce unless it is around 12 or so inches on the small end!

I primarily saw Pine, both White & Red and Hemlock

[red oaks lumber]

spruce is the carp of the wood world :D i think down south they use it to grow grits with ;D

[True North]

I saw quite a bit of spruce, and have found that WM 7 degree blades work best for us. In fact, the 7's seem to work as well or better in most species. Do many of you like them?

[WDH]

Red Oaks,

That hurts  ;D.

[Magicman]

Well DanG.  And all of this time, I thought Sweetgum was the carp of the wood world.   :

[tyb525]

You might try the 7 deg blades, I like them.

[west penn]

 I used to hate spruce also, especially the ones that have been sitting around and dried some.  I use a 10 degree blade but set at .030 before sharpening. I slow it down a little and don't use lube unless it I get a build up on the blade. It actually makes pretty nice lumber but watch for weak spots around the bigger knots.

 

[r.man]

A friend of mine cut mostly spruce on his bandsaw and I remember him saying it cut better frozen than thawed because it lessened the difference between the knots and the rest of the log.

[5quarter]

Pnyberg...I can sympathize. A funny story about spruce. couple years ago, I got in a couple dozen spruce logs that was going for live edge siding for a clients cabin. Three boards into the first log and I shut the saw down. Clearly I had no idea what the heck I was doing. I saw mostly hardwood, so this wholesale destruction of someone elses logs was fairly new to me. About this time, my neighbor comes walking over the bridge over to my place, as he heard the saw running and likes to come help. He sees me sitting on the deck glaring at the mill and the log and sees the boards sitting off to the side. "Those are some amazing boards", he says. "they look like they have waves running the entire length...almost like 3D".
   "not an optical illusion" I said. "those are actual waves".

   I was able to get good lumber from them, but it involved more set, higher tension, lots of diesel and sloooooow feed rates. recently, I got a really nice spruce log... big, straight and lots of red heartwood. I tried one of Cooks Duratooth blades, .045" and it made dead flat lumber without much fuss. I kept the feed slow to maintain blade speed.I think you can get them in .050" and .055" gauge steel. order a couple and see how they run on your saw. I'm thinking more beam strength, more set (around .030") and really sharp teeth should put that dog to bed.

[Brucer]

I rarely saw spruce. The first time I did my 10 deg blade was all over the place. WM had just come out with the 7 deg blade so I tried one out and it made all the difference. There's more than just the hook angle involved. The size and shape of the gullet is different.

[ladylake]

It's the hook angle, when I sharpen my 10* blade to 4* the gullet is the same yet the 4* cut straigher in tough wood.   Steve

[T Welsh]

Spruce in our neck of the woods always has big knots in the butt logs,I use 9 degree blades and have never had a log that cut straight. the difference between the hard knots and soft wood makes the blades run wild,weather I slow down for the knots or run the hard the cut comes out like waves on the ocean. So I tell people that I will cut there logs but I can not hold tolerance with this type of softwood. I have no problems with pine or hemlock. just spruce. Tim 

[SwampDonkey]

A lot of the spruce sawing locally on portable mills is done on pasture spruce, full of knot wood. This is wood that commercial mills refuse to buy. ;D I think some of the sawmillers and customers find out the hard way how miserable it can be to work with. I've seen some log piles of the stuff abandoned by the sawmiller after the first day. As a lot of you fellas know some folks learn best the hard way. ;)

[bandmiller2]

I love all Gods shrubery, just some more than outhers.Vicious sharp band, good set, slow speed the rest is the phase of the moon and dumb luck. Frank C.