Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)
It's been 5 years since my last post. Some new career demands made continuing my woodworking hobby not practical…until I retired 1.5 years ago. I retired where my last career move took me, northern Illinois. My wife and I have a place out in the country on several acres that are heavily wooded. I'm surrounded by ash, walnut, black cherry, maple and hickory. It's taken me a year but I've created a new basement wood shop from all my old equipment that was in storage. This includes my Laguna 14/12 bandsaw. I've created a log milling setup for this bandsaw. Now I'm milling my own lumber. This is a really exciting new dimension to my hobby. This was a bit of an extemporaneous design. Several design changes as I began using the setup. Anyway, works like a charm now. I was inspired by several YouTube videos showing various approaches. The key elements of this thing, IMHO, are: the embedded roller balls on the top, the miter slot the length of the table for obvious reasons, the wheel/track setup on the front edge (pic above) to add stability to the moving sled AND prevent the sled from tipping when cutting a thick (8/4 plus) board that hangs over the inside edge of the table, the reinforced leg assemblies with extended length feet for table stability.I'm a complete novice at this right now. My stash of logs I've accumulated over the last 4 years is 60% ash logs, around 12-20 inches in diameter. The rest is hickory, cherry and a little walnut. I've got a large box elder that blew over 2 years ago, about 30 diameter at chest height. I'll be cutting that trunk up later this year. My bandsaw can handle up to a 12 inch wide resaw. I splurged and bought the Laguna Resaw King blade. It ain't cheap!
All the ash logs I have came from felled trees that had been dead since 2009. Most ash trees succumbed to the Emerald Ash Bore beetle infestation at that time. So these logs are SOMEWHAT seasoned. However, as one of the pics shows, the freshly sliced up boards show 27% moisture. I have noticed that for 4/4 or 5/4 boards the moisture content has dropped to less than 10% in a manner of a few weeks. I'll have to research drying strategies for this new part of my hobby…..
The Sketchup model for this log milling table can be found here.