05 Nov Nick Klaich, Hud-Son Forest Equipment Warrior Sawmill
Nick Klaich “Successful loading and slabbing a 3,000 pound Elm tree-Urban Logging/Hud-Son sawmill”
Good morning, my name is Nick. Some of you might have watched my prior videos where I attempted to place a large Elm tree on my Hud-Son Warrior mill. I was unsuccessful but today we are going to get another tree and I have a new plan. Stay tuned.
Elm tree estimated at 3,000 pounds.
So in the clip here you’ll see me cutting what’s referred to as cookies in the wood working world. These are crosscut sections that can be used for tables or something like that. The maximum distance between the guides on my mill is 31 inches. This piece here that I’m cutting is 35 inches and this tree on my trailer is 12 feet in length. The max I can get on my mill is ten feet long so this is the way I can basically keep cutting these things off and than I get it the maxmium yield on the cookie pieces as well as keeping the long as long as I can for slabbing it out which we will see here in just a second.
I also wanted to take the time to give a shout out to my buddy, Mike, from Battle Born Tree Service in Carson City, Nevada. If your located in the Reno, Carson, or Lake Tahoe area, you should definatly check him out. He does great work and he’s a huge help to me giving me these large logs.
Okay without further audo, the big surprise on this video is how I’m going to get this tree on the mill. It’s actually removing the mill head. With all the ideas I had this seemed the easiest. I really didn’t do a great job prepping the palletjack here. You can see I put two little clamps but it got it off safely. In the future I have a better idea of how to get it attached. Overall I’m going to call it a success getting it safely out of the way so we can get the trailer back up here which you will see in the next video.
So here I’m just showing you the tree the strap goes to, it actually goes under the log deck and than comes out where it is chained around the tree. You’ll see me when I start to pull this off. I’m not too concerned at this flat end were looking at because those seem to land softly. It’s the other end I’m concerned about. If a 3,000 pound log just lands directly on the mill its basically going to bend it and completely throw it out of caliberation. What your going to see me do here is straighten it and then on the other end I’m going to set up some crimping which successfully catches that other half of that load. I know some people have suggested using pipe to get it on and off but here’s the problem. Once the tree is on the trailer I can’t lift it due to the design of the log arch. I really don’t want to put pipe under it while I’m traveling on the freeway because I don’t want to risk any of it coming off.
I think you’ll see here the successful catch of the load with crimping.
“Starts sawmill and start’s cutting with the Hud-Son Forest Equipment Warrior portable sawmill.
So you can see on the side of the log to the right that I shaved off some of the face of it with a carbide grinding disk. I didn’t do enough that’s why the mill is kind of catching here. If you don’t give enough space to have the sawdust inject out than it kind of bogs it down a little bit. So I pushed it thru which is probably not the right thing to do for the guides or the mill but the substant cuts that are not in this video I ended up taking that carbide grinding disk and giving it about three quarters of an inch on either side of the guide so that it preforms much better.
So some of you have not seen my last video. The product that I use to keep my slabs tied tight and straight is called Kubinec strapping. It’s a nelon basked material that has these buckles here that you thread thru and than you rachtet like this. You can get this really tight. Almost like a piano string. Some people were upset that it’s plastic product and that I will ruin the planet. The good thing is that it’s reusuable. You can tighten it with a side rachet or if you stack this up but if you were to break it or pull a slab out of here, you can easily re-loop this and use it again. So it has a lot of life left in it. You can see here how to tight it is and keeping everything in a line.
So on this other stack here you can see I did not use that Kubinec strapping on because I didn’t have it yet. Don’t look at these top three pieces, they don’t really count because they we’re cut with a chainsaw and the ladder moved on the deck. These ones down here you can see that if you don’t put the stickers in the right place where I didn’t and you don’t keep them tight, you get a lot of movement and vibrations on the end so I’m really happy with the new product and the new strapping. It’s definately keeping things tighter and cleaner.
So in the next clip here your going to see me successfully stack two of my log stacks and put them on top of each other. This is something that I’ve been thinking about in my mind on how I would do it and it would obviously expand the limited space I have in my driveway where I could store more material. Having a forklift would be ideal in this situation but I don’t have the money to buy one or to maintain one I’d buy(an older one) on Craigslist or Ebay. I’m pretty pleased here with a little injunity and a little bit of planning I was actually successful in getting them on there. I thought it was relavitly safe looking at the operation afterwards. So happy that this worked and I’m going to keep it going to decrease the footprint around my property.
Well we have arrived at the end of this video and I hope you’re enjoying watching it as much as I’ve enjoyed making it. Hopefully I have inspired one of you to possibly go out there and mill your own lumber or their woodworking projects because it is definately a blast. I enjoy doing it and these video’s allow me to share that journey with you. So please subscribe if you haven’t already done so and I hope you have a great day!
We would be remiss if we did not mention this full circle tear to your eye mesquite log story. This coming from our good friend and customer of Hud-Son sawmills in Cocoa, Florida CW Bailey:
