Primary breakdown is the first stage of turning a log into material — the cuts that open it up and decide what everything after them can be. Open a log well and the rest is predictable. Open it badly and you spend the whole tree working around it.
Flitch
A flitch is a large slab-like section taken straight off the log as it is first opened, before anything is squared. It is not finished lumber and it is not meant to be. It is a look inside.
Opening a big log into flitches does two things. It shows the interior — grain, stain, shake, whatever is in there — before any irreversible decisions get made, and it keeps the widest material the tree can give still on the table. Once a log is cut down to boards it can never be a wide slab again, so on anything with the girth for it, the flitch comes first.
Cant
A cant is the squared timber left in the middle after the outsides come off. Squaring it gives flat, true reference faces, which is what makes every cut after it accurate and repeatable. It is a foundation, not a product — although on a big log the cant is also exactly what a timber framer wants, and it can leave the mill green as it is.
Why It Is Staged
With a two-hundred-year-old storm-fallen log there is no routine to follow. Density changes through it, stress is locked in from decades of wind, and a log can measure right from the outside and open onto stain, shake or a hollow heart. So the plan changes as the log tells you what is in it.
Working in stages is how you keep the option to change your mind. Every cut that comes off a flitch is a decision you can still make differently on the next one — and it is where judgement matters most, because it is the point at which the wood stops being a guess.
Everything leaves the mill rough sawn. How the board is taken out of the log is on quarter sawn, plain sawn and rift, and what comes off one whole tree is on the frugal milling page. Why a log this size changes the job is on why large-diameter logs are different.
Contact
Old Growth Mill
Axson, GA 31624
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (912) 310-0650
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