OldJarheads Milling Thread...

[trimguy]

Nice top!

[Magicman]

I absolutely love it and wish you the very best with your entry. 

[DennisK]

You're never going to leave the kitchen for another room in the house! Beautiful.  8) 

[OlJarhead]

Thanks all!  After a year we still marvel at it  8)  It is the center piece of the room....but I am working on a mate!  A coffee table to match it!

Meanwhile, this old jarhead is back to making sawdust!  Woot!
Milling Pine D Logs - YouTube

[slider]

Glad you are back making saw dust.

[OlJarhead]

Me too!   8)  I am desperate to get those logs milled up and made into D-Logs for the next cabin and the addition to the original and after our ghost town hunting trip decided to do 6" logs all the way!  woot!  Easier for me that way and they had them back 130 years ago so figure if it worked for them ;)

Also got a fair bit of 1's and 3/4" stock milled for other projects.  Only 5 logs on the day and one was mostly a loss (too much punk) but all in all a good day at the cabin milling :D

[OlJarhead]

Got some more D-Logs done despite not being really prepared for it!  But it was good to get some done!  Latest vid in the series for the terminally bored (or those that just love sawmills!) :D

Also subscribed to the FF Youtube channel -- cool stuff! (didn't know there was one until yesterday!)
Milling D-Logs Part Three -- what a view! - YouTube

[Nebraska]

Enjoyed the video,  to any new folks here reading this pondering buying a mill or just new to milling. Read this entire thread, it is gem here on the forum, much knowledge lies within.

[OlJarhead]

Thanks and thanks :D

I've learned a LOT from this forum and made sure to give it a plug in one of my last videos.  Without FF, I'd never have learned how to mill.  Period!

and what can I say?  I love it!
Cheers
8)

[Brob1969]

This is a great thread I've digested on and off over the last couple months. 
During that time I found an old LT40 that had been pretty much abandoned in the woods of North Florida. I purchased it for a really good price (especially considering it included the sharpener and setter as well) and got to work on the restoration. It took a couple thousand dollars to get it going, but the 1990 mill is now sawing nice true lumber!

I've gotten a lot of good insight from reading this thread, and really appreciate all the personal things you've dealt with along the journey.  Life certainly has its own plans that often supersede our own.  Since getting my mill going our family has had some unexpected changes that have diverted my efforts to more pressing projects,  but I've nonetheless cut several thousand board feet both for my own project and a couple of "away" gigs milling for others.   I'm looking forward to really getting into it more later this year.  
I'm a builder also, and I just cleared a lot for a home I'll be building for a close friend of mine.   Despite the fact that the 1.4 acre lot is in town (Gainesville FL), it's never been built on and we harvested close to 20 trees that are nice size.  One of them is the straightest sweet gum trees I've ever seen and is 30" diameter 20' up the trunk!  There are a couple really nice oaks that we'll use for exposed floor joists in a loft area, and several pignut hickorys that will be flooring. 

I have a couple out of state milling gigs later in the year where I will be camping remotely with my wife where we'll be in the mountains.  If I have it calculated correctly, we'll get about 50/50 milling and camping.  

Thanks again for sharing your journey!

[OlJarhead]

Thank you for all the kind words!  

Camping an milling!  8) I love it!  Nothing better with a good setup....well, making a few extra $$$'s while doing it is better....and if you can fit in a Jeep too well, that's the cat's meow :D

Check out my YT stuff, lots of pain there

Life is a journey and sometimes it just kicks you where it hurts and sometimes it gives you grandkids :D

Cheers
Erik

[Darrel]

Life is a journey and sometimes it just kicks you where it hurts and sometimes it gives you grandkids :D

That right there sounds really familiar!  

[paul case]

Well done sir. Carry on.

PC

[OlJarhead]

Dragged the mill the 240 mes back home so I could do some maintenance and prep for a job.  Also brought a load of pine back to put in the woodshed;)

Sawmill life!  Love it.

[Remle]

OldJarhead
A quick question if I may. I'm not familiar with Ponderosa Pine , we have White and Red Pine. Are you concerned with the logs bending ? I've heard that the pith should be centered in the cant as you saw. When you cut off the 3" portion of the cant and made 3 boards, it exposed the pith very close to the flat side. I've seen it in a lot of videos here on the forum and question the out come of the logs. That is , will checking and warping be significant factors ? Starting with a smaller diameter log or increasing the log height to 8" would leave more width to the pith on the flat side. Please don't take my question as criticism , I'm just trying to under stand why people don't seem to center the pith when sawing D logs , as they do while milling other types of lumber..

[OlJarhead]

I try to never split the pith but sometimes it doesn't grow straight ;)

For D logs, movement can occur but I've only lost 1 or 2 due to twisting and it wasn't splitting the pith that caused it (wasn't split in those cases) but rather stress in the log that I just didn't get milled out.

I've done a fair bit of paneling in the early days where I was just off the pith or even split it (before I learned not to) and had no issue at all with Ponderosa.

I think it's a very forgiving wood  8) and barely shrinks too (less that an 8th in anything I've milled out of it.

[OlJarhead]

For the terminally bored (as my dad would say) and those who want to see the mill mods a little closer...
The Old Jarheads Mill, mods and more - YouTube

[OlJarhead]

Got some maintenance done on the mill, just need to finish it (oil change still to go, tighten drive chain and maybe some paint here and there as well as a fix on the umbrella stand) then off to mill up some logs on Badger Mountain near Wenachee.  Down to two days now but still a job and I'll go back 2 or 3 times by the sound of it.

Long drive but I like the guy and I had to do some work on the jeep since the suspension wasn't up to the task when we did the first sections of the BDR.  Here's day two:
We take on Bethel Ridge! - YouTube

Now, back to working on the mill and prepping it for another job!  But what do you do when not milling?

[Crusarius]

I sure miss west coast wheeling.

[WV Sawmiller]

Tom,

   I think we run school buses on roads like that around here in WV. :D :D

    (Well, maybe not quite. :).

[OlJarhead]

Tom,

  I think we run school buses on roads like that around here in WV. :D :D

   (Well, maybe not quite. :).

I bet!  :D ;D  -- of course I did see a school bus doing a water fording once...and one floating down a river.....yer neck o the woods? lol

[Old Greenhorn]

Neat video and of course there is no way to convey he actual feeling or conditions on that road. I congratulate you for having a co-pilot that was game and had a sense of humor, which is critical. My wife would have gotten out before the first mile was done. We get some bad ones around here, but we have nowhere near those elevations involved of course. OTOH we don't have nice shoulders like you had here. The woods road I have driven in the hills here generally have a 30' drop about 6' off the passenger side of the hill, which is god enough to get you going.
 Speaking of School Busses in WV, I know a musician from Kentucky who taught High School in KY for 30 years. He told me that if you had a grammar school certificate of graduation that was easily transferable to a license to teach community college in WV. Is that true? :D ;D Anyway, that's what he told me.
 Been a long time since my 4 wheeling days, I got tired of fixing things all week to go and break them again the following weekend, nowadays all my off road time has some kind of productive work associated with it. Notice I did not say 'profitable'. :D

[OlJarhead]

you musta missed the good stuff where there was no shoulder! 

[WV Sawmiller]

Tom,

   That was a pretty low blow and I am very disappointed to get viciously blindsided like that by some one I thought was a friend. I am pretty sure they have to prove they had at least completed middle school. :D

    At one point we did have what lots of the administrators hated and called the "Taco Bell principal law". Evidently the WV legislature passed a law that if you had 2 years verifiable management experience you could apply for an administrator's certificate with the school system and become a school principal. They used to say, truthfully I think, if someone was a Taco Bell manager for 2+ years he could become a school principal. To make matters worse and really tick them off, I'd ask them "What's wrong with that?" Since my wife was a High School Band director with a secondary in Math, she had her share of very poor principals with few if any management skills. Most had been a high school gym teacher and coach then became a principal. Many had poor people skills, no experience preparing and administering a budget, setting priorities, adjusting to changing conditions, complying with regulations, and mostly managing the teachers and staff and getting them the support they needed to do their job. I still say an excellent principal does not have to have any teaching experience. You and I and any of us who managed others with skills we did not have. We needed to direct and guide that employee to get the job we needed done and interface with the other team members. 

Eric,

   Your trip reminds me of at trip we took from Tennessee to North Carolina many years ago. I was driving a pick up towing a pop up camper. My wife had the map and was navigating. She found a place were we could cross the state lines on a dirt road in a national forest near Tellico Plains. I got to a T intersection and asked her which way to go. She said go right then 1/4 mile later she said "Oh no, we should have gone left" It was a one lane dirt road hugging the side of the mountain so there was no turning around. The road got so narrow and the drop off so steep she was scared to look out so she stuck her camera out the window and took pictures so she could look later. The kids were riding in the back with the camper shell. They were on the passenger side looking down all bug-eyed till Becky yelled at them to go to the other side. I am sure the added weight on the drives side of a 4 & 6 y/o child was all that kept us on the road. : I finally got to the end of the road at a parking area for hikers and a sign that said "Road impassable for vehicular traffic." :P That was not wanted to see. I think I bent the tongue of the camper trailer jacking it around. At one point I thought I was just going to have to disconnect and let it roll over the side of the mountain. We finally got headed back and stopped and asked a backpacker for directions. That is never a good sign and he asked where we came from. He finally said "Well that road should take you there but I did not know you could drive it." We finally got through to paved roads and Tellico Plains.

[Old Greenhorn]

Howard, I am sorry, you may be (and are likely) correct about that middle school thing, all I know is what I was told. Academia is SO unlike the rest of the world, but in that respect (management) it is the same. Some folks should not be in charge of others, it's just that simple.  When I cared about such things I would say there are managers and there are leaders, the problem we have here is that our managers have NO idea what leadership is or what it looks like. Managers do their job and check off boxes on a spreadsheet, leaders figure out what needs to be done, who can do it best, then support them to get it done.