Daninvan
ArboristSite Operative
After a long beach milling drought a couple buddies and I finally managed to get down to the city log dump, which is located on a beautiful beach rather than in a crappy suburban industrial park.
Days are quite short here this time of year, so when I arrived just before 8 AM it was just getting light out. Weather is always a concern this time of year too, but we totally lucked out, it was a beautiful clear and warm winter day, maybe 8 degrees C, perfect for some outdoor exertion! At first there was a bit of fog in the harbour, the lights of the freighters at anchor were glowing through it.
Although there was a decent sized pile of wood to poke through (above photo shows just a fraction of it on the left), much of it was junk, and many of the better logs had already been 'claimed' (local protocol is to spray paint your initials on a log to reserve it). So there was not really a lot of good choices, but we were keen to go for the first beach milling of the season. I found a crotch piece of beech, and a short section of an ornamental cherry log that included the graft union with the flowering cherry wood.
Here's one of the guys milling up the cherry. I have a 36" bar, it cuts to about 31" wide, we had to trim the cherry and the beech both in order to get them to fit the mill. Unfortunately the local cherry has really big growth rings which makes it look a bit coarse, and it seems to suffer from black staining too. You can see the graft union pretty clearly in the piece in the back, the redder wood on the top of the slab is the flowering cherry wood. There is a really big and nasty black stain more or less in the middle of the piece too!
So we finished up with 5 slabs of the beech, and 5 slabs of the cherry. One of the guys is a bowl turner so he cut his beech up into bowl blanks. One of the guys was a milling newbie, so he was happy to take away all the stained cherry, as well as the rest of the beech. My turner buddy doesn't use the stained cherry any more, although he likes it, no one will pay for a bowl with the stains on it. I did not take any wood for myself as I have a ton of beech that I cut a couple weeks ago, and also have no need for stained cherry!
Here is a panorama of the view from the cutting area. The log dump is on the right, with the buildings of downtown Vancouver in the right background, although they might be hard to see. The logs on the left are log boon escapees that get stacked for people to cut into firewood. Not a bad office!
Chainsawing is not permitted in the log dump itself, only in the chainsawing area which is a small spot about a hundred feet or so away from the log dump. I don't think the city wants people clamouring all over precarious heaps of wood in the log dump with chainsaws wailing.
All in all a great day, although the wood was definitely less than great we got a decent amount. When was the last time anyone saw 31" wide cherry or beech at their local lumber yard?! The weather was superb, the view great (as always), the saws and the mills were trouble free. Hoping to get our again soon.
Days are quite short here this time of year, so when I arrived just before 8 AM it was just getting light out. Weather is always a concern this time of year too, but we totally lucked out, it was a beautiful clear and warm winter day, maybe 8 degrees C, perfect for some outdoor exertion! At first there was a bit of fog in the harbour, the lights of the freighters at anchor were glowing through it.
Although there was a decent sized pile of wood to poke through (above photo shows just a fraction of it on the left), much of it was junk, and many of the better logs had already been 'claimed' (local protocol is to spray paint your initials on a log to reserve it). So there was not really a lot of good choices, but we were keen to go for the first beach milling of the season. I found a crotch piece of beech, and a short section of an ornamental cherry log that included the graft union with the flowering cherry wood.
Here's one of the guys milling up the cherry. I have a 36" bar, it cuts to about 31" wide, we had to trim the cherry and the beech both in order to get them to fit the mill. Unfortunately the local cherry has really big growth rings which makes it look a bit coarse, and it seems to suffer from black staining too. You can see the graft union pretty clearly in the piece in the back, the redder wood on the top of the slab is the flowering cherry wood. There is a really big and nasty black stain more or less in the middle of the piece too!
So we finished up with 5 slabs of the beech, and 5 slabs of the cherry. One of the guys is a bowl turner so he cut his beech up into bowl blanks. One of the guys was a milling newbie, so he was happy to take away all the stained cherry, as well as the rest of the beech. My turner buddy doesn't use the stained cherry any more, although he likes it, no one will pay for a bowl with the stains on it. I did not take any wood for myself as I have a ton of beech that I cut a couple weeks ago, and also have no need for stained cherry!
Here is a panorama of the view from the cutting area. The log dump is on the right, with the buildings of downtown Vancouver in the right background, although they might be hard to see. The logs on the left are log boon escapees that get stacked for people to cut into firewood. Not a bad office!
Chainsawing is not permitted in the log dump itself, only in the chainsawing area which is a small spot about a hundred feet or so away from the log dump. I don't think the city wants people clamouring all over precarious heaps of wood in the log dump with chainsaws wailing.
All in all a great day, although the wood was definitely less than great we got a decent amount. When was the last time anyone saw 31" wide cherry or beech at their local lumber yard?! The weather was superb, the view great (as always), the saws and the mills were trouble free. Hoping to get our again soon.
