August 12, 2017
After purchasing the saw mill, we began to mill wood right away. We started with some of the
many trees that we had cut down in the beginning of the summer. The first ones we cut were
10′ long 6 x 6 beams. They will probably be used later for a lean-to for the drying wood.
After we mill the wood it has to dry for ideally 1 year. But our wood has already been outside for quite some time, so it just needs to acclimate to the climate.
Dan and Daniel built a base to lay all of the wood on to completely dry out and acclimate.
Once the base was completely level, which was not as easy to do as it sounds, we could begin stacking the cut wood.
So we continued to mill the wood and carry it over to the stack.
We were originally milling sweet gum trees. Dan also wanted to use western red cedar for our house. He found that beams made of western red cedar were pretty expensive, and the amount of beams we needed for the house would run us about $15,000.00 . So he needed to go to plan B. After doing some research, he learned that telephone poles were usually made of western red cedar. So he searched on Craigslist and found a guy named Mike who had a bunch of poles for sale.
Mike
So Dan and Daniel went to visit Mike and found that he had over a hundred telephone poles and he wanted $50.00 for each one. WOW. That’s a big difference in price. That was a major reason that Dan wanted to buy a saw mill in the first place and do it himself. He knew it would be so much more economical.
So, they made many trips back and forth to Mike’s house and before we knew it, we were milling telephone poles.
The poles were each between 21′ and 34′ long. So after getting them to our property by trailer, we would drag them by truck over to the saw mill. Then we would roll the pole over to where the mill could pick it up.
Once the pole was on the mill, Christina would run the metal detector over the entire pole before Dan began cutting. If he cut into any metal, it would wreck the saw blade.
We pulled out many nails, staples, screws, and even bullets.
Bullets
After the pole was free of metal, Dan would start cutting it to the size he needed. Then we would carry it over to the pile to dry out.
