Tackling the Big Logs with the M7

I heard recently from an old friend, Bill Stuewe of Texas, who is a long-time M7 sawmill owner. Bill has a lot of experience with the M7 and sawing logs. He introduced me into Water logging, when he rescued some trees uprooted by big rains in Texas and he found them floating in a big Texas lake. He pulled them to shore with his boat and loaded them on his trailer and took them home to his Logosol. But that is another story.

Bill sent me a picture of a little church he made from a big Deodar Cedar Tree that fell recently in his neighborhood after a big rain. Apparently, the trees roots couldn't hold it upright anymore and down it came. It comes under "Wood From Heaven" in Bill's book, I guess, or more "wood from water sources". Anyway, Bill grabbed it and took it home to his M7 sawmill.

Only problem, it was a 36" X 16' log. A little big for the M7 sawmill. Except, Bill used the Inversion method of sawing with the mill to take this log apart. He was kind enough to share his photos of his operation with me. You can see from the photos how he did this. He avoided having to elevate the log to the height of the sawmill with this method and milled the log on the ground.

Who's upside down in this picture? Bill or the sawmill?

Here, Bill has made his first cut and now cranked the rail down and is making a second cut on the log.

He then placed the reduced sized log on his mill in the normal position ( right-side up and slabbed out these three big chunks.

Here you can see where he took the edges off these slabs and made beams out of them. He later milled these down into boards and put them in his solar dry kiln.

The cedar wood finally wound up in his wood shed, and some of it made it into the church shown earlier in this article.

Good job, Bill!

(If any of you have a story to share about milling send me an email at charlie@logosol.com or make a comment directly in this blog.)