Milling Some Cherry and Maple

[Al Weber]

A week ago we caught a few days break from the almost daily rains we have had in the NE so I managed to get out and mill a cherry log and then a maple log I had taken down a month or so ago. Because I am building small furniture, I have bucked my logs into the straightest possible lengths so often I have only 4-6 foot lengths although the butt ends usually yield 8 ft lengths. The pictures show some results from the milling operation. Everything is stacked and stickered on the underside of my barn. It is totally covered but open to the elements on one side. I've got a log deck in my field where I take the RipSaw and accessories to on the Gator. I have a couple of furry helpers as you can see. I use an old Ford tractor to move the logs until I can lift the cants onto a set of heavy duty saw horses for final milling. I just started milling about a year ago and am learning something new every time I work at it. The cherry is relatively easy to mill. But I've been working on a couple of rock maple logs and they are slow and difficult to mill. I've gone through a lot of blades on the maple logs.

 

[VT-Woodchuck]

Nice looking lumber! I think it's a real bonus when you build "stuff" and you did it all from falling the tree to building the object.

 

[dustytools]

Very nice lumber!! Nice Gator too!

 

[woodshop]

...The cherry is relatively easy to mill. But I've been working on a couple of rock maple logs and they are slow and difficult to mill. I've gone through a lot of blades on the maple logs.

Curious... do you use a csm to get the logs down to cants first? If not, you will indeed go through many more blades going through bark with that Ripsaw. For less than 200 bucks, a csm will pay for itself in blades saved in no time.

Glad to see others on here also posting pics from their Ripsaw milling. Nice looking cherry boards. Not sure what kind of maple you were milling, but I found maple to me not all that much harder than cherry or walnut. In wood that tight grained though you have to have a sharp blade or it will start to wander quick, and milling with it gets real old fast.

 

[Al Weber]

I have not yet been able to get a csm to do the initial milling. What I have done is debark the maple which helps a lot. With the cherry which I can't easily debark, I have been using my second and third resharpened blades which are doomed to fail soon anyway to make the initial cuts. But even with the naked maples, I still find them to be slow milling, compared with cherry, even with a new blade. I think that New England cherry tends to be somewhat softer than that from PA but I think the rock maples tend to be harder than the mid-Atlantic variety. I know when I bought PA cherry when I lived in NJ that it was a lot more dense than what I find here in NH. So my comparison of the two woods may be exaggerated somewhat.

I've a lot more milling to do and I may end up going the csm route later this summer or fall but I have to get a bar and chain for the 036 to use it with the csm and then adapt the 029 for the RipSaw.