Old Growth Mill practices frugal milling. Frugal from stump to top.
Frugal is not the same as cheap. Cheap is about spending less; frugal is about wasting less, and the two often point in opposite directions. I have replaced good factory parts on my mill with better ones, because a part that saves me money and costs me wood is not a saving. A tree that stood two hundred years deserves better than to have the best of it end up on the burn pile because that was the quicker way to cut it.
This page is what that means in practice: what comes off one tree, and where in the log each piece comes from.
The Middle of the Log
Once a log is opened, the squared timber in the middle of it is a cant. Before it is squared it is usually opened into flitches first, which is the staged way to get at what is inside a large log without committing to it all at once — see flitches, cants and primary breakdown.
On a big log I would rather let the cant go and keep the outsides. A man with a 24-inch mill cannot open a 40-inch log, but he can resaw a cant off one all day, and he does not have two-hundred-year-old cants to resaw. Timber framers want green oak besides: the joinery cuts cleaner, the frame is designed around the shrinkage, and checking is expected rather than counted as a fault. A cant can leave the mill without waiting on drying at all.
The Outside of the Log
The outsides are the part I keep. They are the widest boards the tree will ever give, with the live edge and the sapwood character on them. My mill will open a log up to 36 inches wide and the track runs past 20 feet. Both of those were specified on purpose, because they are the two things most mills will not do, and large-diameter logs are a different job from ordinary sawmill work.
The choice runs one way only. A slab can be resawn into boards later; a log already cut into boards can never be made back into a slab. So anything with the girth for it gets slabbed, because that is the cut that keeps both options open. Everything leaves the mill rough sawn — cut to thickness, not surfaced or planed — which keeps the full dimension in the board and leaves the final sizing to whoever ends up with it.
Quarter Sawn, Plain Sawn and Rift
How a board is taken out of the log decides both how it behaves and what it looks like. Quarter sawn is the stable cut, and in white oak it is the only one that gives ray fleck. Plain sawn gives the cathedral figure, and cathedral scales with the diameter of the log — a 30-inch board off an old oak shows an arch nobody can buy at a lumberyard. Rift is the third and it comes off whether I plan for it or not; it is not quarter sawn, and calling it quarter sawn is the kind of thing that gets noticed once and remembered.
The Crown and the Crotches
Above the trunk is where most operations stop cutting. Crotches, thick limb sections and the crown are where bowl blanks and turning stock come from, and they go out green, because green is what turners want. Straight limb sections too thin for a bowl but long enough to turn go out as lathing lengths, 36 inches and that length only — 36 divides down to two 18-inch chair legs or three 12-inch spindles, so the cutting decision belongs to the man who knows what he is making. Anything that will not make 36 inches is not lathing stock.
Limb wood is reaction wood. It moves more, and less predictably, than anything out of the trunk. That is the other reason it leaves green rather than taking up drying space.
Sold Green Means You Cure It
Anything sold green is end-sealed the day it is cut and moved out rather than left to sit; a green blank in a shed for a month is a cracked blank. When a piece leaves green it leaves green, and the curing is the buyer's. Said plainly up front that is a fair deal. Left unsaid it is a complaint waiting to happen, and drying is the one link in the chain I cannot stand behind on someone else's behalf. Drying, acclimation and movement in old wood is the long version.
Only the Brush Is Waste
Cross-cut rounds off a heavy trunk make table tops. Offcuts too small for anything else make pen blanks and small turning stock, and small pieces are the cheapest way there is to put a tree number in somebody's hands. What is left when all of that is taken is brush. Only the brush is waste, and that is the whole of what frugal from stump to top means.
Every Piece Carries Its Tree Number
Nothing here is anonymous. Each documented tree gets a tree number, the number is written down in a blog post that starts with the tree where it lies and follows it through the mill, and the tree map holds the coordinate it came from. A piece of wood that can be traced back to a particular tree on a particular day is a different thing from a board off a pile, which is why the documentation matters more here than the sawing does.
Where This Stands
The mill is not at the swamp yet. No tree out of it has been cut free, documented, numbered or opened, and nothing on this page is a list of what is on hand — it is a description of what one of these trees yields when it is worked properly. Nothing about any tree is settled until it is opened on the mill anyway: a log can measure right and read right from the outside and still show stain, shake or a hollow heart on the first cut. That is why availability isn't listed.
If you want to know what happens next, the blogs are the record. If you want to ask about something specific, get in touch.
Contact
Old Growth Mill
Axson, GA 31624
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (912) 310-0650
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