Woodmizer: The Fun of Milling Your Own Wood

This is gonna be so much fun. We're gonna talk about milling your own lumber. Using the Woodmizer LX 30. A bunch of things are great about this. You can pick what species you wanna cut.

You can keep track of that material so you end up with sequence cut boards. Which means you're gonna end up with a bunch of book match material when you're done. You can control what size material you're gonna cut and then as it's drying, of course you have perfect control of the drying process. First thing, let's talk about logs and getting them on the mill. Yes, logs are heavy.

This is a chunk of elm. But if you've got it on bunks, if you've got it on skids like I do here, what you'll find is that we can hook into it, drag it pretty easy. That's not bad. Then when you're ready to get that baby up on the mill. I am taking advantage of Woodmizer's log ramps, so the way these work is that it's a one way street.

The log can roll over and lay that down once it goes past. That'll pop back up. That prevents the log from rolling back on me. Who said with a big enough lever, I can move the world with a good can hook, you can easily roll that log. Next thing we'll get set up to do some cutting.

Couple of things I did. I leveled the log so the pith is parallel to the bed. That's what the 2 by 4 is all about. I've got this in place that locks the log in. Now we're ready to make a cut.

What'll happen here is just one slab is gonna come off the top, then we'll stop and talk about the next step. One of the things you'll see is I'm using a water mix here as a lubricant on the blade, so you will see that coming out there on the band saw head. Next thing I'm gonna grab my can hook, roll that over, get that flat spot on the bed, and we're ready for another cut. Let's talk about strategies. Once you've got that first flat produced rolling the log over and sitting on the flat, you can probably see that really helps to keep things stabilized on this log.

I'm gonna do what's called plain sawing or through and through. Through and through is a great name. What that means at its simplest is from this position. I lower the blade. I make another cut.

I lower the blade. I make another cut. So when we're done, we have a bunch of planks and the little smiley faces, the annual rings are right across the end grain. It's a very common way to cut wood. It's the easiest way to cut wood, and the alternative to that is what's called quarter sawn.

It's another great thing about having your own mill: quarter sawn lumber, and lumber that you buy commercially is incredibly expensive. It's about twice as much per board foot as plain sawn, but you can easily quarter sawn your own stack when you have your own mill. I'm gonna continue with plain sawing, and we're gonna do two different things here. I'm gonna get two more planks off the top of this log with their live edges in place, and we're gonna deal with those later, and then we'll move on to another part of the strategy. One thing that's really cool about this mill is that.

I want to make five quarter lumber. There's no guesswork involved here. Look at the scale; I can see that I'm in a position here for five quarter. So now, when I do this lowering the head, all I gotta do is go to the next hash mark there, and that sets me up to cut another five quarter piece. I'm gonna do that, and then we'll just keep on keeping on.

If you cut lumber and you don't sweep it a little bit and throw water on it to see how cool the grain is, you're missing out. I'm gonna move that top slab, go get a bucket of water, and we're gonna look at this amazing elm that I'm cutting. Are you ready for this? What's cool about this is it gives you a great idea. Of what that's gonna look like under finish, and it makes me really excited to be able to want to work with this.

Elm is not a wood I can buy commercially here in Wisconsin, so the only way for me to get this is to cut it myself. Couple of different ways to get your lumber dimensional. Remember when I did those first cuts, I took those slabs off the mill, set them aside. We're gonna look at them again in a second, but if you want live edge stuff, when you make that cut, you're done and just set it aside live edge. If you want to make four square boards, you can do what I'm doing here.

The scale that I showed you earlier on the 5/4 dimension also tells me how high the blade is. Above the bed. So what I just did is I cut this 12 inches wide piece in this direction. Now I can roll that one more time. And as I start cutting my planks, they're all gonna be 12 inches wide or 6 inches wide or 8 inches wide, whatever you've determined when you're making this block.

So there are a lot of ways you can take advantage of that scale on the mill to get exactly what you want out of it. In my case, I'm gonna roll this again from that 12 inch face. I'm gonna cut more 5 quarter lumber. Look at that beautiful piece of elm. I'm gonna get the rest of that cut up, and then I'm gonna show you another option with this live edge stuff.

So remember what we've talked about. The stuff I just cut, if I left that alone, I'd have live edge slips. If you want to mill lumber, one way we can do it is to cut those live edge slabs, bring them back, standing them on edge, remembering that our scale shows us how high above the bed the blade is. So if at this point I want to turn those into 5/4 by 6, all I gotta do is roll them over, cut edge down. Set my scale to 6 and I'm ready to cut or make the large block that's dimensionally accurate, dimensionally correct, and then from that cut your finished dimension boards.

So there are a lot of options about how we can work with the mill. The other thing I want to show you now is some crazy cool stuff that I cut. Just a couple of days ago. Here's some stuff I cut just the other day. Look at this walnut.

The reason I specifically wanted this log is it had this crotch at this end. Check this out. See if I can get a little water on this one. And again, when I'm keeping track of these pieces, they're sequence cut, their book matches to each other, mirror images on the grain, crazy cool. The other thing I did is I cut some cookies, so I had an ash log and after I milled my planks out of it, I saved an end.

And I put that on the sawmill standing up so that I could cut a couple of cookies. I love ash. What a beautiful wood. So where I'm going with all of this is to make sure you understand the multiple, multiple, multiple options you have in milling your own stuff. You saw it's not that hard to get the log on the mill.

We talked about plain sawing and quarter sawing. You've got options there depending on how you want to machine your stuff. You can pick the species again, that elm that I cut, I can't buy that commercially, but now I've got a lot of board feet of elm to work with. Once everything comes off the mill, you're gonna sticker it. Dry it, and once you've got it dry, you've got access to crazy cool stuff that you milled yourself.