A Day at the Mill

Good morning everyone. The weather has been absolutely spectacular these past few days… a harbinger of summer weather to come. There is so much we want to do now that the snow is melting away. Sawlogs that have been buried in the snow drifts are ready for sawing.

Yesterday Bruce and I built a brow for the mill. In the past we have had to roll the logs up a couple planks to get them on the mill. With the new brow we can keep logs off of the ground and roll them straight from our tandem axle trailer onto the brow and from the brow onto the mill. It all goes pretty darn slick. And all of this was built with logs that Bruce and I milled ourselves.

I also fired up the mill expecting to have a number of cobwebs to have to clean up after a year of idleness. She started on the second pull with gas that I put in a year ago! That Briggs and Stratton fuel stabilizer is amazing stuff. I highly recommend it. I whittled out one small pine log and the mill ran just fine. Bruce has some more spruce logs at Burnt Island, victims of the recent storm. I hope to travel down to retrieve them very soon.

Pictured here is a red oak log that came from a tree I felled last fall when we were building the chicken coop. That log is 17 clear feet long. It makes my heart go pitter patter to see such a beautiful log. How many growth rings can you count? (Hint: Click and enlarge the photo.) The spruce log in the background is twice as old. The stories it could tell of a time when Burnt Island was probably barren of many trees. I can‚Äòt wait until I am an old spruce and, good Lord willing, able to tell folks about a few of the changes I have seen. People we meet on the schooner or on the street are not all that different from trees… filled with stories, amazing swirling twists in the grain, and roots that spread further than any outsider might suspect.

Have a great day. Be well. Do good.

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