Finally, I get a great piece of ash

A couple of years ago a 2 trunk white ash went over on our vacation property & lodged in the crotch of a dead & unstable white birch at about a 45deg angle. Being an amateur in the woods with a chainsaw, not a lumberjack, (you might want to go to youtube & search the lumberjack song for a laugh) I decided to wait until it broke out & fell to the ground instead of onto me. It did so over last winter, so a friend & I cut it into 12 foot logs – 8 foot is the minimum the wood miser carriage will take, and I find 8 ft boards don’t suit my needs, so I re-cut the 12’s to 6 footers, which gives me less waste on my type projects & stores easier, too. (I don’t make a lot of conference tables & big stuff)

By the way, the large trunk you see in the first pic at left is a hemlock.
Here’s the sawyer at work. He only lives about 5 minutes from my place, so paying for travel time was really not an issue. He only charges $45 / hour (this is northwoods Wisconsin, guys & gals) and I wasn’t sure how much time it would take. I was pleasantly surprised to find that (with me kicking the logs onto the carriage & then grabbing the sawed boards off the saw)...remember…Northwoods, here, they’ll let you help, we finished the logs in about an hour & a half. My bill was $ 65. We figure I ended up with about 200 bd ft.

I sealed the ends & it’s racked & stickered in a neighbor’s pole bldg. I only problem now is having the patience to let it dry. It went in at the end of August, so I’m hoping be late next summer I’ll be able to get started on something. It’s a lot more exciting than I thought…that is, not buying lumber, but rather getting it off the land & cutting & handling yourself. But now the wait…oh, the wait.

-- Accuracy is not in your power tool, it's in you