How to get narrow boards from a big log?

[alan gage]

I've currently got a 20x22" walnut cant on my mill. Tomorrow evening I'll finish sawing it. For my personal use, which this will probably be, I've decided to keep most lumber 12" and under. I don't want 20" boards but that's what I'm going to get for a while on this cant.

So how do you handle it when a log gives you wider lumber than you want? Splitting these 20" wide boards down the middle would give me 10" boards, which would be a good width, but then the growth rings will be off center which could hurt the aesthetics and possibly create a bigger risk of drying defects?

I could take a 10" board out of the middle of each board and two 5" boards from each side which would leave the growth rings centered on the widest board but that's twice the number of cuts and it would be nicer to have something wider than 5" from the best part of the tree.

Maybe I'm just being too picky and over thinking it.

Anyway, just wondering how everyone else handles it.

Alan

 

[KenMac]

I think I have an idea of the best way to saw it based on a previous thread here, but I want to wait and see what the consensus is. I'm very interested in this as I run into similar circumstances occasionally.

[moodnacreek]

When I have to saw 2x4s I start with a large dia. log and saw 4" or 8 1/4' cants that go back on the mill to make 2" thick. Some bow and most are rift and quarter sawn. Get high quality lumber this way.

[WV Sawmiller]

    I don't know what thickness boards you want but if I am understanding your right, yes, I'd take approximately 5" off each side (Maybe 4 on one and 6 on the other if making 8/4 boards) leaving me with a 12X22 cant which I'd stand up narrow side up and saw to the rails but that is just me.

[Satamax]

Since flatsawn wood is not the best, because it cups. I would make two 22x10 cants. And saw these to the bed. 

[Magicman]

Follow WV's suggestion and you will be OK.  Edge the side boards into 3 boards keeping the cathedral pattern in the center board.

[longtime lurker]

I'd make wide boards and then find another smaller log. Or sell them and buy some narrow ones.

Turning big logs into small boards is a form of waste, pure and simple.

(Yeah I do it sometimes too)

[kantuckid]

I generally try to leave the pith of walnut encased in a thicker cut which become turning squares later ripped on my table saw. Though sap wood varies on walnut I too agree with skimming the sides as WV says as the sap wood is easily buggy and sawing for ones self use will never look as good as the heart even when stained. 
I'd prefer boards ranging up to ~8-10" for my own use. Some times I book match walnut in cabinet doors so that matters for my own use. 

[YellowHammer]

I sometimes want to make large logs into smaller boards, poplar especially because I get many in the 30" to 40" diameter range and most people prefer buying 8 to 12 inch poplar lumber.  

I use two techniques.

Saw as wide as possible off the mill, dry the boards, and then rip them down to desired width when dry with the twin blade edger.  One pass with the edger yields 3 boards.

Or use the RRQS gunbarreling technique and just keep taking flatsawn facets off until I get the log down diameter to where I want it.  Basically shrink the log, like peeling a carrot, taking balanced flatsawn but narrower facet boards the whole time.  So instead of a 4 sided cant I'll have an 8 sided cant and the boards will be suitably narrow.  I don't rotate every cut, simply saw a facet down until the boards get too wide, them rotate and hit the other side, and just keep whittling.  This also lets me concentrate on the best faces to get the highest quality wood.  I still have to edge the boards when dry, but we pretty much SLR everything before we sell it anyway, so it's no big deal.  

[WV Sawmiller]

Since flatsawn wood is not the best, because it cups. I would make two 22x10 cants. And saw these to the bed.

You would split the pith down the middle? That is generally a big no-no for most of us because the resulting boards will bow badly.

[moodnacreek]

I'd make wide boards and then find another smaller log. Or sell them and buy some narrow ones.

Turning big logs into small boards is a form of waste, pure and simple.

(Yeah I do it sometimes too)

Cutting 2x4 is also a waste and I only do it for myself and special customers. To do it with small logs is way to much work and I have no market for the sides and even if I did there is no profit [ in normal times]. I never do many and with a fat softwood log it is over fast. And I am finding that very few want the wide [ over 12"] boards that the big log should be cut into.

[alan gage]

I appreciate all the good ideas.

I agree it appears a bit wasteful but it seems I get more big logs than small logs and with a 12" jointer and 18" planer it's kind of pointless to take really wide boards. I don't like moving them either. If there's a good market around here for lumber like this I don't have the time or ambition to seek it out. I've sold some but not much.

I was especially intrigued by Yellowhammer's method of sawing an octagon and pulling from 8 faces rather than 4. Not quite intrigued enough to try it tonight but I'll keep it in the quiver.

Tonight I just whittled away at the cant. Unfortunately one face had a big old nasty knot in the middle of it. I worked the other 3 faces down, trying to keep the rings balanced, and then took two 8/4 boards from the ugly face. This got me down to a roughly 12x16 cant and from there it was easy to chase the clear faces and get the widths I wanted. When done I put the half dozen 18-20" boards back on the mill and ripped some off each edge. I'm happy with what I got, which was a couple hundred BF of 5/4 walnut in the 5-12" range and a couple 18" wide 8/4 pieces that I decided to leave full width.



Alan

[Don P]

I worked in a panel line in one furniture plant, one of their rules was nothing wider than 4.5". We would get in random width hardwoods break em down and glue em up. The wide boards were KD, nice eye candy but the glueups were much more stable.

[Larry]

A log should be put to its highest use.  For a big walnut live edge slabs would make the most money.  Second would be 8/4 lumber as wide as possible.  Third would be 4/4 as wide as possible.  Wide boards from big logs don't cup near as much as wide boards from small logs.  When dry one could rip from each edge to keep centered grain or even just split the board.

Just my opinion.  To take a hardwood cant, especially walnut, and saw it through and through to the bed is the very worse use and borderline criminal.  Of course if you want pallet wood that's ok.

[WV Sawmiller]

Larry,

   Very good points but since the OP said he already had a 20X22 cant and wanted boards under 12" wide and wanted to know how to get them that is what I think most of us addressed. Maybe he will saw the next one differently based on your comments here. ;)

[BenTN]

Split the 20" into 3, 6-1/4" cants centering pith. Stand them up and saw thru at 8/4 or 5/4, but trap the pith in a one 8/4 x 6-1/4 board. This would give a mix of flat, rift and quarter sawn boards in a manageable width. 

[YellowHammer]

I was especially intrigued by Yellowhammer's method of sawing an octagon and pulling from 8 faces rather than 4. Not quite intrigued enough to try it tonight but I'll keep it in the quiver.

There are a few reasons why I like to do it this way.

Width control:  It gives me complete control of the width of the side wood face boards.  Basically, open the best face, then a flitch, then another flitch until I hit my max desired board width, then rotate 180 and repeat and rotate to another facet and continue "peeling the carrot" with all the boards in the width range I want.  

Produces high grade wood: Then take advantage of the many facets and get to the face where a knot or defect will be in a facet corner, and then start taking more flitches until either the max desired board width is reached, or the defect has been removed, in the corner of a board, then repeat with other faces until the cant can be formed into the final desired dimension and the pith crack is put in the correct orientation to maximize yield.  The facets don't have to be equal and generally, as I find the high grade faces, I will keep sawing them with the intent of using them to reduce the cant to where I want it.

Fast:  It's a continuous sawing process.  Some of the conventional techniques involve using a wide cant and cutting them into multiple cants of desired width and then sawing them.  That will work, but it is slower, as it turns one log into three cants, each then sawn individually.  With the facet technique especially with a hydraulic mill with a dragback, its just saw the board, drag the board back, saw a couple more off that face until I exceed my width goal, rotate to a new face, saw a couple more, continuously targeting the best faces, and at some point start "peeling the carrot" heavy on select sides so the cant goes from 8 facets to 4 and can be sawn conventionally.  There are no breaks in sawing, and boards come off continuously, all are flat sawn, all are balanced, and are the highest grade I can get.

[moodnacreek]

A log should be put to its highest use.  For a big walnut live edge slabs would make the most money.  Second would be 8/4 lumber as wide as possible.  Third would be 4/4 as wide as possible.  Wide boards from big logs don't cup near as much as wide boards from small logs.  When dry one could rip from each edge to keep centered grain or even just split the board.

Just my opinion.  To take a hardwood cant, especially walnut, and saw it through and through to the bed is the very worse use and borderline criminal.  Of course if you want pallet wood that's ok.

This is very true and it took me a long time to learn to saw what sells rather than what the log should have been used for. When you saw for a living it get's sinful .

[alan gage]

A log should be put to its highest use.  For a big walnut live edge slabs would make the most money.  Second would be 8/4 lumber as wide as possible.  Third would be 4/4 as wide as possible.  Wide boards from big logs don't cup near as much as wide boards from small logs.  When dry one could rip from each edge to keep centered grain or even just split the board.

Just my opinion.  To take a hardwood cant, especially walnut, and saw it through and through to the bed is the very worse use and borderline criminal.  Of course if you want pallet wood that's ok.

Good points. I'm glad to hear wide boards from big logs tend to dry flatter. I haven't had much really wide stuff get through the drying stage yet so I've been a little gun shy. Cutting wide and ripping when dry, if necessary, is certainly an option. It doesn't eliminate the need to move those big pieces around though. Having had back surgery already I'm a less enthusiastic about moving heavy things.

As for putting a log to its highest use I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. For many years a big logs highest purpose, to me, would have been firewood. I didn't do wood working, no one around here had a mill, and no one around here buys logs. Logs either go to the tree dump or are cut up as firewood. As someone who heats with wood the only value in logs was firewood.

Now, obviously, doing woodworking, building structures, and owning a sawmill I look at a log's purpose differently. I look at the log and think about what I might want to build from it in the future and try to saw it accordingly. I'm not huge fan of the live edge look and I'm more inclined to glue up a few boards rather than trying to make a 26" wide top out of a single piece. So narrower boards, that can be handled with my equipment, are more useful than wide boards I can't joint/plane.

If I was selling wood then I'd have a different outlook on the highest purpose of a log, which would be to make me money. I do sell a little wood but I've found that between my full time job and my full time projects/hobbies that I don't have a lot of time left over for sawing wood for others, marketing, and selling. For the time being I've decided to concentrate on sawing for me and putting selling on the back burner.

And if I really wanted to be a contrarian I'd suspect that a logs highest purpose would be rotting on a forest floor and returning to nature.

I sawed up a couple more walnut logs tonight and you'll be happy to know the largest log was almost all wide 8/4 boards. Mostly because I found log to be full of nails so the fewer cuts the better.

Alan

[Woodpecker52]

Highest and best use always pertains to the owner.

[Walnut Beast]

A log should be put to its highest use.  For a big walnut live edge slabs would make the most money.  Second would be 8/4 lumber as wide as possible.  Third would be 4/4 as wide as possible.  Wide boards from big logs don't cup near as much as wide boards from small logs.  When dry one could rip from each edge to keep centered grain or even just split the board.

Just my opinion.  To take a hardwood cant, especially walnut, and saw it through and through to the bed is the very worse use and borderline criminal.  Of course if you want pallet wood that's ok.

What thickness are you cutting slabs Larry

[longtime lurker]

A log should be put to its highest use.  For a big walnut live edge slabs would make the most money.  Second would be 8/4 lumber as wide as possible.  Third would be 4/4 as wide as possible.  Wide boards from big logs don't cup near as much as wide boards from small logs.  When dry one could rip from each edge to keep centered grain or even just split the board.

Just my opinion.  To take a hardwood cant, especially walnut, and saw it through and through to the bed is the very worse use and borderline criminal.  Of course if you want pallet wood that's ok.

This is very true and it took me a long time to learn to saw what sells rather than what the log should have been used for. When you saw for a living it get's sinful .

I've been saying for years there's three ways to saw any log
1. the way that will give the highest yield volume (recovery rate)
2. the way that will give the highest yield value
3. the way we're sawing it today because thats what the order book says.
If I ever fluke the trifecta I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. :D

One of my good habits is always pulling the worst log from a pile that should cut whatever size the order book dictates.
The great problem with timber is that you can't weld it back together.

[Larry]

What thickness are you cutting slabs Larry

My customers want slabs sawn in the 2" to 3" range.  The guys re-selling
want them on the thin side of that range so they get more slabs out of the log.  The guys building tables want them on the thicker side so they know they will have plenty of meat to get them flat.

I've been hearing with the big slabs (wider than I can saw) that it sometimes takes an inch to get them flat.

The slabs I saw for myself are 2-1/2" thick.

[alan gage]

I don't get very many long logs. I saw a lot of 6 footers, which is what the original log in this thread was. Yesterday I sawed up a couple decent sized 10' walnut logs and to keep everyone happy I took wide boards from it. But only one of those wide boards was 8/4. My dad showed up for a minute so while he was there I took the opportunity to cut a 19" wide 8/4 slab, which was way more than I wanted to move myself. Even the 5/4 stuff was pushing it. Once it was whittled down to a 12" cant I took some more 8/4 boards.

Yes, I do try to avoid lifting the whole thing at once. I can pivot one end over to the stack and then pivot the other end over. But it takes some time and still isn't light on those big ones. I find the heaviest lifting comes when stacking on the pallet, trying to get it placed without moving the stickers out of place.

Alan

[customsawyer]

I saw slabs at 6/4, 9/4,and 12/4 with my WM mill. If I'm sawing with the lucas then it is wider than 30" and I add a inch for planing.