Milling Red Maple Slabs

Soon after moving here, Mike and his brother purchased a sawmill and installed it not very far from our house next to a small pond.  The possibilities seemed endless.  We started with a few small projects to learn about different woods and know better the direction we wanted to go.  The sawmill was always just for personal projects and never meant to be a business or provide income.  However, the going has been a little slower than we thought it would be.  Turns out, cutting and moving large trees is really hard work, especially when the temperatures and humidities both approach three digits and you are working alone.

Over the last year we’ve (a very loose term which is actually translated as Mike) milled some pecan to make a fireplace mantel for our daughter and more recently we had the opportunity to work with some beautiful red maple.  A very large tree fell across the street from a friend who decided he would find someone to bring it to us for milling.  He and his son arrived here with a log which was about 10 feet long and close to 30” in diameter.  The sawmill can handle 30” max so this was our first time to work with anything that large.

The three men managed to get it onto the mill, helped hugely by the fact that one of them was a youngster and started cutting.  The wood was so beautiful, everyone was getting pretty excited.  Another friend stopped by to see it and there were many ideas about the amazing things that could be made from it.

So far, it is sitting down by the mill drying and no final destinations or purposes have been settled.  For now, it’s still satisfying to just look at it and enjoy the process.  The raw material is there waiting for skilled hands to fashion it into something new.