Fun project splitting a square beam diagonally

[scsmith42]

A good friend of mine named Doug called a couple of days ago and asked if I could clean up some reclaimed southern yellow pine beams that he wanted to use in a home remodeling project.  He showed up this morning with several beams on his trailer; most measured in the 8" x 12" x 10' range with old paint on the outside.

Three of the beams measured 11.5" square..

Fortunately they had been well gone over and de-nailed (we only found 2 nails with the metal detector), and I milled the smaller ones them down to 6" x 9" beams. The three large ones were milled into 9x9's.

Doug had mentioned that he wanted to take two of the 9x9 beams and split them in two - hollow them out and use them to encapsulate several conduits that fed a kitchen island from the ceiling.  He is an extraordinary gifted fabricator (and I have a small amount of experience in this area as well); we ended up putting our heads together and making a couple of fixtures that would clamp on to the Baker Sawmill and support the beams in a diagonal position - allowing me to precisely  (well, within 1/8") split them from corner to corner. 

The resulting triangular shaped pieces were then set up on the Peterson swing blade mill and had the centers removed.

Rather than making a temporary jig out of wood, we opted to fabricate them out of metal so that they could be reused in the future.

All in all a fun project.

Here are the brackets after welding.




And installed on Tom the Baker Sawmill.  The angle supports are drilled to allow a lag bolt to be installed to hold the cant in place for milling.

[scsmith42]

A log that was setup on the Peterson sawmill served to support the half-cants while I notched out the center.



Here is what the finished hollow post looked like.



And here is one of the finished brackets after painting.  



It's fun to do a project with a good friend - especially when your skillsets complement one another.

[Old Greenhorn]

Pretty neat thinking outside the box(beam) there! Nicely done!

[caveman]

That is pretty slick.  Thank you for sharing that with us.

[Stephen1]

I like splitting corner to corner . Nice work.

[beenthere]

Fun project, with a good ending. Hope to see a finished pic when installed.

Might you be able to use these brackets to process a round log pretty close to the same technique ?

Seems Jeff was cleverly making logs into corner trim cabin logs back in the day 20 years ago. They looked great.

[doc henderson]

Hey if those are 6 x 9, and the jig is at a 45-degree angle, how did you split them down the middle?

[scsmith42]

Hey if those are 6 x 9, and the jig is at a 45-degree angle, how did you split them down the middle?

Lol, great catch Doc!  I've amended my original post.

 Chock it up to an old man who spent too many hours in the hot sun today!

[scsmith42]

Might you be able to use these brackets to process a round log pretty close to the same technique ?

Should be able to.

[Larry]

Cool, I really like the brackets you made. Some years ago I had a order to saw a few octagonal cedar posts and hacked up a similar bracket from plywood but it was big and clumsy. Pain to use. The octagonal posts sorta caught on with a couple of builders and I sawed quite a few over the years.

[Nebraska]

That looks like a fun project.  Swing blade mill was perfect to do it with. 

[Resonator]

Neat use of different saws and jigs to achieve the end result!
Could use the same technique to make a hollow mantle.