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In this video I want to talk to you about a little known operation that I call saw milling on a bandsaw
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and it's a way of taking short logs and actually milling them into boards so you can make small projects
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So it's really quite fun. You can make use of wood that would normally go to waste
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You can make use of species of wood that is not available commercially
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It's a good time. It's a lot of fun. I want to show you this project here. I made this about 40 years ago
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and I used the same technique to get the wood that I needed
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Now this is cherry. There's no finish on it. Well there's no stain on it certainly. There's a finish. It's sealed in urethane but that color is natural
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It's a little music box here. I made this for the young lady that I would eventually marry
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and this is the box that I gave her one day I think for her 18th birthday or something like that
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Now I cut this. I cut the boards. You can see the boards aren't very thick. They're little short thin boards
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I cut them from what we call around here choke cherry trees
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So it's an actual cherry tree. It's wild. The cherries aren't very sweet
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The pit is huge. There's not a lot of flesh in it and they never get very big
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They only get to be about that big or so at the most
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But that's enough for this kind of operation. You can take small logs like that and you can turn it into really interesting stuff
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So this wood here is just a log I grabbed from my firewood pile actually
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It's just poplar. That's what we call it around here poplar. So it's not a fancy wood or anything
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It was a log at one time but the first operation for any sort of saw milling like this
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is to simply draw a line down the middle of your log and then to cut it in half freehand
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So that's what I did here. There's a little bit of a wow to it
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I mean I'm just doing it by hand so it's not perfectly precise but it's precise enough
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Another option is to actually split the log in half with a firewood log splitter
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That can work too. I've done that as well. But essentially what you want to get to eventually is something like this
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So flat where it will run on the table. Flat where it will run against the fence
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Here's an example of the kind of miniature board you can cut from it
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It's fairly wet. I can feel the wetness because this was cut not that long ago
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So you have to dry this wood just like you would lumber coming off of a regular saw mill
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with little sticks between the pieces of wood. You can really speed drying by putting a fan on it as well, blowing some air on it
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It wouldn't take very long for wood this thin to get dry enough to make things out of
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Furniture type things or little box type things. Three or four weeks actually is all you need if you have some air blowing over it
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So right now I just want to show you what this looks like
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This is a saw milling operation so we'll adjust the fence here and give it a go
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Resawing or saw milling little logs like this works well even for logs that are longer
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You know three or four feet long you should be able to handle that especially with a helper
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I guess more than anything what I like about this is that it gets you closer to the source of the lumber
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and it offers extra creative options. Like for instance, a beautiful kind of wood is apple wood
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It makes great little projects. You never get big long planks of apple wood because apple trees are kind of gnarly and branchy
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and they never get very long and straight. But with this operation you can make use of that kind of wood
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Maybe there's a precious tree in your backyard and it had to be cut down or something like that
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You can preserve that tree in the form of little projects you make like this
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Just another thing you can do with the great old bandsaw
