Hello all. first post heere and i hope you experts can lend some advice.
I have acccess to a huge oak that is down. it has been down a while (at an angle from the base, not touching the ground) and i think is very dry. i am not familiar with the prperties of oak, but this tree is like 3-4 ft in diameter, and the main trunk is about 15 feet long, with two other branches about 18″ in diameter and maybe 15′ long.
i want to either: slab it up to make a table and or benches. tomorrow i will start contacting mills to see about my options. my second option: just sell the massive logs, or the slabs. that is if anyone around my area would even be interested. most people here dont think of furniture and want to cut it up for fire wood. i love bbq, but would rather make somehting.
anyway, i ahev always wanted to make a large slab table and a seperate modern type bench i have an ideas for. however, now with a huge chunk of wood in front of me, i am not sure what my options are. heck this stuff may not even be worth doing anything with.
any advice would be much appreciated.
thanks in advance.
Replies
Slabbing Oak
First of all, oak in the log for is not dry. If it is dry, it would be severely cracked and useless. The thickest slab you could make with oak is around 2". Any more than the risk of developing cracks is very high. To dry oak that is 2" thick will take a long time, the wood can only dry at a rate of 1%-2% per day at the max, any faster you get cracks because the moisture inside the cells cannot migrate to the surface fast enough. So the surface becomes over dry and tries to shrink while the center is still wet impeding the movement of the wood, and cracks develop.
If you want large slabs you have 2 choices, a slab straight though the center would yield mostly quarter sawn, but would contain the pith. Oak pith is very unsightly and will crack easily. The other option is to take sequential slabs from the outer bark working inward, this would be a combination of face cut, or face and rift. If the slab is fairly wide (over 2-ft) expect some severe cupping in the drying process. One way to help eleviate cupping is to constrain the slab with weight, a lot of it, several hundred pounds spread out over it, but be mindfull dont cover the slabs, use stickers to allow air flow so drying can continue.
The tree sounds fairly large, 36-48" diameter log will challenge a sawyer, and most portable bandmills may not be able to handle that large of a log. I had a 38" bur oak long I had to rip in two, right down the middle so I could saw it up on my Timberking, it's a bit wastefull but better than firewood.
As long as the log still has bark on it (or no noticible cracks into it) and you don't see any punky (rotted) wood, I would always make lumber out of it before making firewood. But please maximize our forest resources, make 1" thick from the outermost part of the log and reserve the 2" thick as you work further inward. Sawing a tree with a sawmill will still make some nice firewood from edge trimmings and bark flitches.
PS, a tree this large would make some of the best quarternsawn lumber you would ever see!
Here is a pic of a rather large Nebraska grown Bur Oak, I bet you thought trees didn't grow it this state!
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