What are you building with your milled wood? merged

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Yeah I understand the feeling Bob. When something like this happens to me it always serves to remind me just how fast things can change in life. Tomorrow is never guaranteed let alone the rest of today. After spending 2 months with my twins in the New Born Intensive Care Unit I gained an appreciation for life that I had never really understood before. It's funny how long life can feel sometimes yet in reality it is so very short. I learned fast in those two months to slow down and appreciate the little stuff in life that so many people tend to overlook.
 
And what a great treat to live to see a 60th anniversary. I can only hope to see that milestone in my lifetime. I'm 36 now and my wife and I are 15 years in so I feel blessed to have started our journey early in life and hope to see that goal someday.
 
Nearly finished building our gazebo/arbor from the West Aus. Flooded Gum we milled several weeks back. Spent quite a bit of time dressing and routing each of the pieces. All the timber has been liberally coated in a linseed oil and turpentine mix. Just in time for a fire, sausage sizzle and a beer tonight.
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Eventually it will have a few extra rafters added and be completely covered in grapes, surrounded by fruit trees.
 
Just make sure Czech's pigeons don't roost in the grapes while you are working on the sausage and beer. Both projects look nice! The pigeons look happy. I've often thought of a gazebo like that with Wisteria vine. I always liked the purple flowers, Joe.
 
The next little project to go milling timber for will be a hexagon arbor for my daughter and that will covered in wisteria that she grew from seed.
 
Just make sure Czech's pigeons don't roost in the grapes while you are working on the sausage and beer. Both projects look nice! The pigeons look happy. I've often thought of a gazebo like that with Wisteria vine. I always liked the purple flowers, Joe.
I'm sure pigeon with a red wine jus would be an acceptable appetiser.
 
About 2 years ago, one of the old timers with bad hips and knees at the Community Mens shed asked me if I would be able to supply him with some smallish piece of solid timber to make some cutting boards out of.
It was going to be his contribution to products to be sold at a fair we were supposed to be having.
Down at the milling yard I found an old grey slab of a Queensland Box amongst the discard pile and took it home.

I knew it was going to be beyond the old timer's ability to break up the slab so I though I would do that and while I was at it I would pass it though through my thicknesser.

And this is what I delivered to him at the shed. This a very common street tree in my area - makes me look at them in a new light.
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Two years on and the fair never happened because we has very little to sell, and the old timer stopped coming to the shed - poor bloke can barely walk with the aid of a walker.

Last week we were having a bit of a clean up and I found 3 of the 4 blanks in the metal shop under a pile of oily rusty metal. One of the blanks had been used as a base on which to drill holes into something and I don't know where the 4th one has gone.

I took the blanks home, passed them through the thicknesser again to remove the oily stains and drill hole marks. Then a quick pass over the router table, a couple of coats of food safe oil and here they are.

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The cutting boards will be put up for sale at a fair in a couple of months. At least we now have something to sell, actually the blokes have been making a fat bit of stuff so it's looking pretty good so far.
 
My first project with CSMed lumber is a hay wagon for hauling large round hay bales. In theory it will hold at least 14 of them and they weigh about 1000 lbs. each. The length is slightly over 21 feet. The width of the deck boards will be 9'. The span between the wagon axles is 13'. The width to the outer edge of the two main beams is 42". The deck boards will be CSMed 2 X 6 minimum and hardwood, probably quaking or bigtooth aspen. The frame is black oak. The two main beams are 8 X 12 X 21', milled freehand with an MS 250. From the butt log of one of the trees, I freehanded a 12 X 12 X 11' cant and then built a CSM and got 5 usable 2" boards from it, using my MS 250 with an 18" bar and a .325 ripping chain. From those five boards, I made the outriggers, their braces, and the front and rear end plates.

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Since I decided that milling my own would be an acceptable way of getting deck boards for the hay wagon, I decided to put some effort into making the production of 30+ deck boards go smoothly. I had some leftover 2" X 8" black oak, so I made a log end cradle with it. I might set it up on some 4x4 sleepers to save on my back a little but this thing is solid and heavy.

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I think I will like working on this trailer. I set the log into the cradle with my tractor bucket and rolled the ends until it felt really stable. Then I rinsed it and set up for the first cut.

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I was able to make the first cut before the weather shut me down for the day.

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This is a set of garden furniture that I recently built from Irish Oak

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