Yep, it happens. I put forward tips and knowledge that we use ourselves, and it is all "real" information, not second hand or hearsay stuff. This is what we do and use everyday.

I appreciate that! True statements, some want to learn how to be better, some don't care at all.

Thanks! The LT35 is a fine mill, and hopefully lots of what I talk about are things you can use.

@@HobbyHardwoodAlabama absolutely!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks! Chip does the hard work, though!

Straight boards you will saw! But yes, work smarter and never lift both ends of a board at the same time.

Yes, that's what I'm going to have to do, I just hate re handling hunks of wood, I could spend the time making new product, not cleaning up old pieces.

Thanks!

Now we TALKING my language! One of the best movies made! WM knows me and also know I will say what I think, and they are too nervous to ever sponsor me because I might say something truthful but critical of their sawmills! Anyway, I don't want their money, and don't want to sell my soul to them, I want folks like you to have a good and fun time running a sawmill!

How long did it take to get it ready?

@@Plankmills I put a deposit on the mill in February of 2023. Turns out my mill wasn't ready, someone else's mill was ready and they couldn't accept it so I moved up the list. I was expecting mine to be ready this summer.

Thanks!

Thanks!

Glad to help

Welcome aboard!

Milling gum and keeping it straight is tough! It is definitely a "technical" species to saw..

Thanks! I agree that laser can be beneficial and have a one in a box that I just can't get around to installing.

Thanks again!

"Well, what do you say we get thrown out of an Applebee's?"

Glad you enjoyed it

You are welcome!

Very nice!

These tips really work. Thanks!

Go for it!

Glad to help

Glad it was helpful!

Sounds like fun, and you will do fine!

You bet

Thanks!

We have been asked to open franchises across the country, but I'm not interested. If I told you the amounts of money we have turned down, from companies you've probably heard of, to buy us out and use our name, you wouldn't believe me. I just tell them I will never work for them to screw the public, I work for folks like yourself and woodworkers who appreciate an honest guy who's not bought and sold and who does what he does because he enjoys it. We do what we do and enjoy doing it, and try to show other people how to do it, also. Thanks for watching!

I hear what you are saying, and I agree that slabs cut through the pith have a certain market value to certain woodworkers, but you are describing slabs from premium and valuable species, such as walnut that can be made into a resin table and furniture that actual has some value, and be a work of art, not a low value species such as this. Also, I am not incorrect in that I am basing my opinions on millions of dollars of lumber and slabs sold, including walnut to people all over the country, some of which build slabs tables and furniture in the near $100K range. But these customers are very few and far between and if I based my business on them showing up and buying cracked wood, I would starve. In summary, a cracked slab of any species will have a lower sell rate than the same piece not split. Especially low value logs, such as a popular log, and nobody pays for a pith check or split poplar slab. I have had customers ask me to stop cleaning up the high value walnut slabs, because as they say " how can I put a bowtie into something that instal split" and we do sell some of them (walnut) with heart checks you could drive a truck through, but those buyers are rare and even then, very selective about the cracks they will buy. However, most of the professional furniture makers and private homeowners do not want to mess with them. We empirically test it every time we sell slabs, I will include a few pith crack or defective slabs in the pallet and when the pallet is sold out, ALL the clean slabs are gone and the only ones left are a percentage of the cracked ones are so when it is all said and done, the only slabs left on the pallet are cracked and I am forced to put a new pallet of not cracked slabs down. In addition, and I have tested this several times through the years, I will accumulate a pallet of cracked slabs (because everybody tells me how much they are worth) and they sell only slowly, and as soon as I get tired of looking at them I will edge them out and clean them up and the clean boards will sell immediately. Once again, profit and sale are hard to argue with. I would say the "sell ratio" of clean to pith cracked live edge is about 10:1 in walnut, and less than 50:1 in a low value species such as poplar and oak. So I know for certain, when this pallet of poplar is put on the showroom floor, when it is sold to the bottom, the only slabs left will be those cracked ones on the bottom and I will be forced to edge them out to sell them. Remember we get customers from all over the country and if I thought I was missing out on money, I would change strategies. Either way, for a monetary standpoint, it is a waste of time and money for me to purposely saw cracked live edge. I do highly respect your opinion and thank you for the insight. Robert

@@HobbyHardwoodAlabama Hey Robert...Thank you for such a great response!!! As per my own and a following conversation about this video with others, I would love to see you do a video addressing some of this topic. Someone like you that fully understands wood and both sides of this topic could do a very informative video on the differences between production milling and modern drying of lumber, as compared to the traditional aspects of the craft and what those differences are. Thanks again for a great channel!!! Jay

That is a fact! I've done to more than once. It's always good for a few sparks!

Yes, sapwood will always pull, you always have to be aware of that and make the initial cuts accordingly. I like circular mills, very fast, just I can not get insurance for one or I'd have one myself. Every time I talked to an insurance company, they had visions of Dudly DoWright getting split in half on one and it was a no go.

Mineralized poplar.

It was mineralized poplar. The stickers are basic hardwood.

@@HobbyHardwoodAlabama I'm sorry i meant how did you make the what looks like diagonal grooves on the stickers? And i guess that aids drying or maybe resists staining? That poplar is gorgeous!

You are 100% correct, I can't tell you how many times I have had a customer tell me they "needed" 16 foot long boards, only to carry them to their truck and saw them in half with a circular saw. 90% of high grade furniture lumber is sold as 10 foot and under.

Good observation! I did level the bark (parrall bark sawing technique) on the top side because that was the highest grade side I wanted to saw, but when I turned that face to the bed, the cant would not be tapered anymore.

Thanks, that's what I thought. I didn't pay as much attention as I should have when you turned the cant and the taper was an after thought. Thanks again.

Thanks!

We have eastern red cedar here, which is a juniper, and the short answer is "yes."

Are you the only one who caught that? Good job!

He was in the quad, sleeping as usual.

The center is juvenile wood and if sheared closely on its endgrain, using a very share knife or blade, the differences in cellular structure will be apparent.

You are correct it is useful for dimensional lumber in softwoods where it doesn't split so much, but it's only real hardwood commercial use is in railroad crossties, which are always center cut along the pith. Walk a hundred miles of railroad track and every single crosstie will have mega cracks in them. So they are good for crossties, but not for high grade lumber. The issue with using them for posts is that they will split enough where a high percentage will be completely not useful for dimensional load bearing uses, and will never pass building codes if used for commercial purposes. Certainly they can be sold to a specific market, but not as commercial dimensional lumber, not for furniture, and only crossties and pallet wood, which are very low value products. Or firewood.

I knew I was going to tick some people off saying that, but hey it was a joke!

I've tried that, the problem is the double handling of very wide and heavy boards to rip the center out is a total pain in the rear. Also, like in the board in the video, if there are cracks in the slabs, they have a tendency to propagate, so can crack into clean wood and damage more. Basically, it comes down to either take the center out as a strategy to get clean slabs, or leave them in there, and sell the slabs as epoxy fills, which we also do. However, the percentage of customers who want to do full epoxy in the cracks is about 10:1, so clean slabs sell much better than cracked ones and even though the full wide will have more "virtual bdft" we price and sell on non defective "no cracks" so we would deduct the cracked pith from the price of the slab, anyway, unless it is very minor. I just can't bring myself to have people pay for cracked wood, even if it is in a cracked live edge slab. You are correct, the 8 inches are cut opposite the stress, but with the way we dry and do the secondary processing, they will be straight when we sell them. It's a case of fix the sawing stress with machines after the drying.

Yes, there is a greater chance the 8" boards will bow, but, there are a couple things that will limit that and reduces my concern on them. The wood is poplar, which is generally pretty mild mannered as a whole, and the pith crack is actually fairly small and not propagating through the end of the log, indicating that although there is some stress, there is not a whole lot in this particular log. Also, I know for certain that the slabs will crack and devalue, however, there is a chance the 8" boards will stay straight enough to not be defective, especially since I can stack a few thousand pounds of weight on them to force them flat when they dry. So It''s a case of knowing they will be devalued by sawing through the pith, or taking a chance they will not be devalued by avoiding the pith but sawing in a bow plane of stress, knowing that I still have some techniques in reserve to try to limit the bow. Worst case, they will bow like crazy, and I can cut them in half and so reduce the bow by 4X and sell them as table leg stock or some other product. Either way I will sell them and make money.

Yep!

It doesn't matter as long as they are not colored dark wood like walnut, or wood that holds lots of moisture, like poplar or basswood. So most stickers are made of oak or other clean hardwood. The main thing is that they need to be at least air dried to prevent the chances of sticker stain. More importantly, they all need to be the same thickness and placed relatively close together, 16" is good, 2' is maximum. Good stickers make good lumber, bad stickers ruin it.

Yes, there is a greater chance the 8" boards will bow, but, there are a couple things that will limit that and my concern on these slabs. The wood is poplar, which is generally pretty mold mannered as a whole, and the pith cracks is actually fairly small and not propagating through the end of the log, indicating that although there is some stress, there is not a whole lot in this particular log. Also, I know for certain that the slabs will crack and devalue, however, there is a chance the 8" boards will stay straight enough to not be defective, especially since I can stack a few thousand pounds of weight on them to force them flat when they dry. So It''s a case of knowing they will be devalued by sawing through the pith, or taking a chance they will not be devalued by avoiding the pith but sawing in a bow plane of stress, knowing that I still have some techniques in reserve to try to limit the bow. Worst case, they will bow like crazy, and I can cut them in half and so reduce the bow by 4X and sell them as table leg stock or some other product. Either way I will sell them and make money.

Thanks Professor Milton. Its good to know you have plenty of techniques in reserve to make use of whatever you saw. Thanks for giving us a glimpse in your videos of some of your techniques and some of the theory/why's of what you do. I appreciate the videos and insight you share. Thanks for spending the time to put the videos together.

No, they were 2 - 3/8" The Accuset calculates in the thickness o the band and adjusts the drop so that the boards will come out to the dimension I desire.

Thanks

I was wondering if anybody even remembered Bob Ross.

@@HobbyHardwoodAlabama every episode is on KZfaq. If you need to relax before bed, just watch one of his videos, they call it ASMR if you haven’t heard of it helps reduce your heart rhythm.

Well, I heat them up in a forge and twist them! No, it's a patented technique.

I had a feeling that was a question I wasn’t getting an answer to👍🏼. Love the videos

That's like being too drunk to fish!

@@HobbyHardwoodAlabama it's also a line from talladega nights. Lol

I got one this week, lots of gray hair falling to the floor.

Sorry, I don’t dance and bounce like some of the Spandex KZfaq channels. However, if you want to learn how to make a few million bucks with a sawmill, you won’t learn that from them, either. Sweet dreams….

I don't do it as manipulative, I do it to get a point across when I'm describing people doing something that I think is wrong or uniformed. There's no reason for me to do it if they are doing something right! Maybe that's why your son in law does it too? You might ask him.

Yes, I'm not a big fan of it, but people pay good money for it and I might as well do as good a job as I can.

Yeah, I saw the basket weaving finals on the ESPN the other day, it did look difficult!