Milling Wood Problems.

Milling wood for furniture or wood turning is an interesting experience. The bark of a tree can hid many secrets. Obviously becoming more experienced means I can see subtle clues but there is not always anything showing on the bark after many years or decades. Sometimes milling wood and lifting up the plank reveals the most beautiful figuring that wasn’t expected. Then the excitement grows with each cut. Sometimes there can be disappointments – a nasty area where a dead branch has spoiled otherwise good wood or a rotten area, even a whole section that is hollow. One old Sycamore had a pink area in the middle that was very beautiful. However, as it seasoned this area shrunk more than the rest and cracked making the whole plank of limited value for any use. (I think it must have been just preparing to rot but not quite started.) Anyway, from being a very interesting and exciting tree it ended up a lot of work for very little. Win some lose some, I guess.

Milling wood is at its most interesting and challenging when finding foreign matter in the tree. One lovely Beech tree got sawn up for firewood as it had been used to attach fencing. This wasn’t just a modern pig-wire fence either. This was four strands of thick barbed wire wrapped round the whole trunk! (Incidentally, it was a man from Pembrokeshire who had emigrated to America who invented barbed wire. Hm, he has a lot to answer for.) There was nothing we could do.

I was able to get a large Ash tree from a field on the side of the A40. This is the road leading to London and would have always been a busy road including way back with the Drovers taking cattle, sheep, geese, etc. to England. If this tree could speak it would surely have tales to tell. Anyway, when it came to milling the wood problems were experienced several inches under the bark. We assumed that nails had been put into it to help someone to climb up it and took a thicker cut to try to get under the nails. No, there were more nails. And yet more! When we spoke to the landowner we learned what the problem was. There was a pub down the road and signs had been hung from the tree!

The tree with the greatest variety of different foreign articles in it was a Yew tree. Because Yew trees tend to have lots of branches that grow together they can be tempting places to put things (and for birds to nest?) and the branches grow ever closer so hiding rather than discarding the pieces put there. In this one tree there was:- plain wire, copper wire, nails of varying sizes, screws, part of a coconut shell, two pieces of slate, a chunk of sandstone, a piece of clinker from a fire and something that might be natural stone but from its shape looks more like a piece of pottery. Here is just a selection of what was rescued from the tree and could have gone through the saw mill!

I would be far more reluctant to mill wood with the band-saw than the chain saw as the latter is easier to re-sharpen. Interestingly, and surprisingly what seems to destroy the sharpness more than anything else is not metal but stone. This means that milling wood at the base of a tree near the roots (which can yield the most beautiful figuring) can also destroy the sharpness of the blade very quickly even though one can’t see that it is cutting anything other than wood, it is just that the soil is in the wood.