# More Firewood in case you aren't tired of it yet.



## Dal300 (Aug 4, 2011)

The other day I had to take some dead branches off one of our sycamore trees that were dead or dieing and threatening us as we walked under them
This is some of the wood I saved from the burning pile:









Then we had a limb come down on one of our outbuildings from an old Live Oak and I saved these:









It's not a lot of lumber and some will probably twist and warp, but it's nice looking stuff that I may be able to do something with.


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## Kentuk55 (Sep 21, 2010)

I see a few unique projects in the works soon


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## Dal300 (Aug 4, 2011)

The Sycamore, even though it was still live, (almost), showed moisture of about 17%. It's too long to put in my little solar kiln so it will have to air dry which shouldn't really take that long.
The oak pictured here was green green green! My moisture meter just showed 0L. 
I put a couple of pieces in the old house oven for about 12 hours @ 170° to see if I could dry it a bit. 
This brought it down to about 24% so I stuck a couple of the pieces back in the next day and got it down to 13% which is close to ambient around here lately.
The piece of oak shown at an angle on top of the stack was planed to 3/4" and I am amazed at the figuring and whorls of stuff in it. There are two places that look like tiny knots clustered together that are actually tiny little areas of "birdseye" figuring. I've never seen "Birdseyes" in oak, especially Live Oak before.
That brown stain in the lower left corner of the bottom picture goes all the way through. At first I thought it was oil from the chain saw, but the grain in that area is loose and actually has separations in the grain that you can almost see all the way through.

Tomorrow the wife will be gone to Tyler and I may go down and see if I can cut some more from that tree. I wish it wasn't so difficult to dry. I have some that I cut for firewood a couple of years ago and it's still showing 30%+ moisture, although it's been in the shop most of that time.


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## MoshupTrail (Aug 11, 2011)

Limbs can be tough to work with. Because they grow under stress they will move as you cut them. Looks good though. Wish you luck!


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## RussellAP (Feb 21, 2012)

Lay it flat and put some weigh on it and forget about it for a year, it will stay straight.


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## HerbC (Jul 28, 2010)

Dallas,

I have some sycamore that I cut a while back. I had a couple of yard trees from the neighborhood, wound up letting them sit for about three years before I got them milled. I had a good bit of spalting and some larger borers got into most of the logs and left some pretty large wormholes…

Here's the sawyer starting to mill one of the logs.










Here's the lumber stacked for drying before I added the tin top cover.










Here's a closeup of a section of quartersawn sycamore.










I found that the sycamore dried much quicker than I expected. Withing a couple of months I was getting readings of 10% or less from most of the 4/4 boards I checked. By comparison, the cypress I had milled at the same time was in the 30% range at that time.

Good luck with your sycamore.

Be Careful!

Herb


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## DHacke (Feb 25, 2012)

So did you mill the limbs on just a normal bandsaw for in a wood shop and if so can yuo post some pics of how you set up to do it I want to do this as well as I have alder and maple all over around my home.

Thank you David


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