Homelite
ArboristSite Member
I met a guy through a friend of mine that does woodworking and was interested in buying some of the walnut I had drying. I was willing to sell him some, but as some of you may know, walnut is a little difficult to come by, so I was a little hesitant to sell any as I didn't know where my next logs were going to come from. He called me up one day and mentioned that he worked with someone that had 5 walnut trees that needed to come down. He mentioned that they were about 16-18 inches dbh, so naturally I got a little excited and we decided to cut them down and mill them up and split the lumber. I had the day off work and we met up so that I could see the trees for the first time. Utter disappointment. They were less than 12 inches dbh, right against the house, and had poorly trimmed/hacked branches starting 2 feet off the ground. I explained what to look for in a "millable" tree as he wasn't at all familiar with the ins and outs. Anyway, we decided to make the best of the rest of the day and I mentioned that they were cutting down a few trees by my place for road improvements and we might be able to get something from the side of the road. We drove up towards my place and saw that the tree service was still cutting the trees down, limbing them and leaving everything else to be picked up when they were done with the job. I stopped and asked about the trees and they said the more we picked up, the less they had to, so take as much as you can. Say no more. We bucked out a nice 18 inch by 8 ft white oak, halved it, and got the two cants over the gurad rail and in my truck. By the time we finished that and dropped it off at my place, the tree crew had finished a 36" dbh triple stem walnut with 18-20 inch stems. Jackpot. We ended up with about 10 logs between 16-22 inches in diameter and 4.5 to 7 ft in length. We decided to get together and mill it up over the next month and got some really nice boards out of it. The 2 largest logs we took up the road to a guy with a LT40 Super and he milled them up for free (well, I agreed to help him mill up a huge cherry butt log with his 090 Granberg). We ended up getting about 250 board feet at last count and I have included a couple of pics of one of the 2 crotch pieces we picked up. I don't have any pics of the rest of the haul, but I know a lot of you enjoy the stories with the pics.
