Size is not the deciding factor, and it is the one everybody starts with. I will take a serious tree over fifty scrub oaks, but I will also walk away from a big one — and most of what decides it can be read off the tree before the saw ever touches it.
Measure Both Diameters
A tree grows away from competition, so it is not round. It is an oval, usually with the long axis pointing where the light was. Measure the wide way and you will flatter yourself: it is the short axis that governs what you can square out of it. A tree that measures 44 inches the generous way can fail to give a 36-inch cant, and you find that out with the log already on the mill.
That same eccentric growth is telling you something else. Wood that grew hard on one side to hold the tree up is reaction wood: it cuts woolly, it moves badly afterwards, and it can release stress mid-cut and close on the blade. So the roundest logs come first, not the biggest. Large-diameter logs raise the stakes on every one of these calls.
Read the Face, Then Cut One
You can tell a good deal about a tree's life from the end of it — how the rings run, where it grew fast, where something happened to it. Stain reads as internal damage and usually is.
The catch with storm-thrown trees is that none of them have a sawn face. They tore off the stump, so the end is splintered and torn and cannot be read properly at all. One recon crosscut per candidate is the cheapest information you will ever buy on a log.
What Is Grown Inside It
An old tree beside a fence line has wire, staples and nails grown six inches deep with nothing showing on the outside. It costs a band blade to find out. A metal detector before the first cut is not being careful, it is being solvent.
Not everything grown inside is bad news. I have seen a tree that absorbed two smaller ones when it was young — two extra piths inside the host's rings, wild figure through the join, and included bark where the three of them met. That is a defect by any lumber grading rule and it is exactly what the character market pays most for. Which of the two it is depends entirely on who the board is for.
Species, Settled Properly
A phone app is a first pass and no more. The oaks in a south Georgia river swamp — overcup, swamp chestnut, cherrybark, water, willow, laurel — differ enormously in value and hybridise freely. The end grain settles the group: white oak has tyloses and will not pass air, red oak will. The acorns settle the species. Until then it stays provisional, and that is why the map pin says so.
Sometimes the Answer Is No
A log can measure right, read right and still open onto shake, a hollow heart or stain right through. The honest answer then is to stop, and it costs nothing but the recon cut. That is also why nothing here is listed as available before it is opened — see why availability isn't listed. What the tree actually is, once you get into it, is on old growth timber and storm-fallen trees vs harvested timber.
Contact
Old Growth Mill
Axson, GA 31624
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (912) 310-0650
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