Securing a Future

 

Four or five years ago now, we had a derecho come through our area and took out three of my trees. As I still had plenty of firewood from trees I cut down a decade before, I cut the two trees closest to my yard into stove lengths to season and piled up the small branches to burn some winter when conditions are right. I am still waiting on those conditions. A third tree, a black cherry, blew down on the steepest part of our sloping knob out back. It was nice and straight and would have made for some excellent lumber to use on projects if only I had a sawmill or even some way to haul it up and out of the huge ditch it is in and haul it to a sawmill. But I don't and due to the location, it has just laid there on the ground all these years.

A few years back, a friend of mine asked if I could cut him a little chunk of it for some project the next time I had my chainsaw out. I did that and while at it, cut off the above chunk for myself. I lugged both chunks, heavy in water weight up and out of the deep ditch and up the hill to my garage where I delivered one to my friend and pushed the chunk for myself back into the corner where it has set. Last year, I tried to cut it using my bandsaw but found the blade in it, the original one I'm guessing, was way too dull. So I bought a new blade which I tossed onto the chunk in the corner and both sat there for yet another year. Finally, I decided to get that wood up and off the floor and taking up space.

I took a scrap piece of board and screwed it onto the underneath side to act as a straight edge and with my new bandsaw blade attached, cut the log into slabs of wood. They are far from desirable with a lot of warp, checking and unevenness caused by my blade wandering left and right a bit. But I did get enough boards for a small project if someday I want to go to the work of flattening and milling them down into nice even pieces of wood.

But for today, they will probably remain all winter on my workbench as seen below and then next spring, go up onto my small wood storage rack waiting for a day and a project that comes along that they can fill.  for the observant, the far left piece is actually cut from a small chunk of Osage Orange that I harvested maybe eight or nine years ago for another friend and it has been residing on my small board storage rack all these years. I decided to cut it into a single slab while I was in the groove.