I hope this won’t be too hard a lesson.

I cut about 500 bdft of ash, maple and cherry with a new sawyer today. He said his Woodmizer could only be set to cut 7/8 or 1 1/4. It was an older machine without the fancy computer settings, so I thought, “well, the saw has a really smooth finish to it, and I always seem to be dressing off sooo much of a 1″ board (one that started out 1″ green) to get it to 3/4″, so why not cut to 7/8″ green.”.

Thinking back, I am guess what the sawyer really meant was “Its too hard to subtract in my head 1 1/8th every time”. Here’s my problem: I found at

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM329.pdf

the figure of 7-10% shrinkage for ash and maple. I don’t care about shrinkage across the face, but I really want to be able to get a full 3/4 thickness after dressing. If 7/8ths green ash and maple (soft) won’t go down more than 5% or so in thickness, then I am ok. At 7% I am really pushing my luck and at 10% I am busted. Now, I can make up some calculation tables really quick for us to refer to (proactive stance) or demand that this otherwise really hardworking great guy work on his math, or find another sawyer and pay a trucker to haul the logs out of his yard, defeating the cost savings pretty much totally.

I have about 15 black walnut logs waiting to be picked up, so I could use any opinions on how much I can expect shinkage in thickness for ash and maple in NC.

Thanks greatly for any thoughts.

JK