Milling the Almond tree

Hi All,

First, a picture:

From 230809 milling almond

At first I was not sure that milling this was worth my while. However, the good LJ’s here pointed me in the right direction and so I found myself loading the mill on the trailer on Sunday morning heading toward my friend and the tree. BTW, the mill was kept loaded on the trailer for a month and no opportunity showed itself. two days after I unloaded it, I get a call from this friend. go figure.

Anyway, as Steve (daltxguy) is now in the woods i got another friend to help me with the setup and just keep an extra eye. you can really make stupid mistakes sometimes.

managed to back the trailer into the right place (I am actually getting better at doing this) and we looked at the tree. two obvious problems – there was a 30 degrees bend in the middle and a fence wire (good thick quality one) was popping from about the thickest part of the tree.

as for the first problem, we managed to cut the tree to two parts with a small chainsaw and big bowsaw. took a while to do…
as for the second problem – we tried to pull it out but it seems to start in the middle of the wood. we nibbled with the chainsaw but we couldn’t get it out. eventually we decided to try and keep it in the slab.

this wood was cut about 3 weeks ago. it hardly dried (its winter here) and it was HEAVY. it took 3 strong (ok, 2 strong and me) man to roll each half it to the middle of the lawn (the smaller half was about 2m long with 30-40 cm diameter, the larger half was 1.5m with 50-60 cm diameter)

once positioned we set up the mill around it, making no more than 4 mistakes..

we started milling the thinner half and didn’t get much quality dimensional timber from it, but the slab the we had at the end was very pretty and just shouted “I am a Y shaped bench!” (sorry, no pictures of this, maybe in a few days)

we milled the thicker part and got lots of excellent quality 8”X1” boards with fantastic grain.

From 230809 milling almond

From 230809 milling almond

From 230809 milling almond

the end of the milling was very hard as the blade was very blunt, and I did not have the sharpener with me, but we finished it (at the end I think it cut by friction only…)

you notice that the timber is sunset orange. this is really weird – its pinkish white when you cut it and within a minute or two its orange. at the end of the day the lawn looked like a scene from Mars:

From 230809 milling almond

and you can see there the bigger slab that might end up as my living room table…. who knows…. here is a closer look. the photo was taken right after the cutting and the timber did not reach its full orange colour

From 230809 milling almond

All in all it was a fun day and I would like to thank all the LJs that tried to find how this timber looks like for me.

-- The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep...