Culled My Kiln

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It is one nasty day here...okay it has been really nasty all week with rain and heavy winds. I just finished up my last woodworking project (a wooden model of my Uncle's silage chopper) so I am in between projects. No big deal but everything I started, I lost interest on. So I decided to cull my kiln.

Now my kiln is a solar kiln so its more storage then kiln, but I had lumber in there for the last 3 years. Its kind of funny too, I remember putting some Maple Boards in there and was very hesitant to put them on the bottom of the pile. Oh how I wanted to get right to them and make something from them. Now I am glad I put them on the bottom. Over the years I have steadily built up a pile of green lumber and slowly my kiln become inverted.

That is I had dry, dry lumber on the bottom and greenier lumber on the top. Since I typically use small quantities of wood, I would run out, grab something only partially down and use it. Something had to change.

So day I pulled everything out and redid the pile. I took out all my stickers and flat piled everything since its now all dry. I also put everything into same species piles like Ash, Basswood, Beech, Apple and Maple. That will make life easier when I want a certain species.

While I was in there I culled a lot of my nastier boards. Since I saw my own lumber I tend to keep the whole log, but after awhile I get tired of moving and moving again, marginal lumber. So I had a big pile of wood, and even bigger fire and culled my kiln.

I still have not got anything in mind to build, but my kiln is at least organized. The one thing I probably should have done is write down the lengths, widths and species of boards I have so I have an inventory of sorts.Perhaps in another lifetime I will be more organized :)

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Travis I would also be interested in the plans on your kiln. One questions how do you keep it from drying out the lumber to quick from overheating due to the sun exposure??
 
Oh there are no plans, I designed the thing myself. Its not actually all that practical. The problem is it is narrow (4 feet) and long. (16 feet) I did that because I have been known to cut long boards for such things as my hardwood flooring and whatnot. The problem is,this long narrow approach kind of makes loading and unloading the kiln kind of tough. If I was smart, I would put an access door inside the back wall of my shop that way I could get at wood inside the kiln from both ends. The one from inside the shop would be nice because I could just stand in my shop and get dry wood as I need it.

As for keeping my kiln from over drying wood, its impossible to do with a solar kiln because it just does not get that hot. It helps too that I live in Maine on one of the foggiest spots on the east coast.

I could do a ton of things to improve the effeciency of this kiln. The first being to orient the angle to a lower pitch. Its something like 55º and should ideally be 49º. The other thing is to insulate it and paint the interior black to help retain heat.

So if I know all this, why don't I do it? Well I alluded to that in my first post. It has to do with time. Just piled up under cover, boards will dry out on average in one year for every inch of thickness. Since my wood has been undercover for 2 years and is only 1 inch thick, they are plenty dry. I also got about 2 thousand board feet under cover in the sawmill. At some point I might try and make my kiln work better, but for right now I really don't need to dry wood fast.

Now the one thing this kiln MIGHT be able to do that I have not tapped into yet, is help heat my shop in the winter. It might not heat the place to 70º, but it could certainly help lower the btu requirements of my propane heater by quite a bit (I think anyway). I am just saying this kiln has quite a bit of potential to be more then it is at this point. Just need sometime and motivation to do it.
 
kiln designs

Rich and Ken, You can find everything you need to know about kilns at www.woodweb.com This is a web site devoted to the science of forestry/wood industry. There is a whole section in the knowledge base on all kinds of kilns with lots of detailed designs.
 
Travis, What sawmill are you using? I am sawmillenvious. I've been pining away for a mill for about 8 years. I just lost out on a Lucas Mill a couple of years ago at an auction and have looked at a few Woodmizers a few times. I really want to get a Peterson mill.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine called and asked if I would help him clean up a few trees when the power company felled them in his front yard. I told him I would be over as soon as they got them down. A few days ago another friend asked me to help him cut up 2 large trees as soon as the excavation crew pushed them over. I said "sure, I'll be right there". Heck I heat the home and shop with wood so it's a good deal. Well, The excavation crew knocked them down today and the power company crew knocked theirs down TODAY. I had to put the one job off to go clean up the power company trees because they are blocking his driveway. Before I was done I ended up felling a 2' dia. cherry tree. and did a test cut on a 4' dia. hard maple that split and blew over just behind the cherry. This was in my friends woods and the maple is curly and spalted.:thumb::thumb: The total for his place will be; 2 very large hard maples, 1 cherry, 1 large white oak, and the top from 1 walnut + several other walnut limbs. Also he is going to sell 2 veneer walnut trees that are 2'+ dia. and probably 80' tall.
The second place has 1 large soft maple, 1 large Chinese elm, and an orchard that had 20 apple trees.
I'm always finding free trees and I hate to cut them into firewood. The cherry was dead but looks real good with only about 2" of rot on the outside. I bucked it into 3 logs.

I need a mill!!!!! It just doesn't work well to use a Alaskan chainsaw mill clone. :( I share one with a friend and it has worked in a bind, but it is slooowww going. I run a 385xp husky most of the time.
 
We have a couple of sawmills. The first is a 1901 Lane which is a 52 inch rotary sawmill and was more of a production mill. No portability to this thing. It was a stand alone building, ran on a 1965 327 engine and would hog through wood all day at about 5000-7000 bf per day.

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The second sawmill was one me and may dad fabricated up, and while it worked, it was driven by a chainsaw, but as you well know, you make one cut today and finish the second cut tomorrow. It was slow.....We are thinking about redoing it over so that it will saw clapboards instead and maybe make better use of time and the time we got into it. But right now we really have no use for clap boards so reconfiguring it is not high priority.

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The sawmill we own,that we use the most now is actually a portable bandsaw made by a neighbor called the Thomas Bandsaw. He makes and sells a lot of them and its a pretty good rig. It can only saw 1000-1500 bf per day as this one is only a hobby mill, but for the occasional tree we want converted into boards, it works just fine.


Now most of the time I have my logs sawn by a custom sawyer. It sounds crazy with so many sawmills in the family, but its just easier. I have barely enough time to pull the logs out of the woods, let alone take the time to cut them into boards. For 20 cents a BF I can have a local Mennonite come in and knock them out in no time. He's fast, cheap and does a good job. I have used him so much now that its just a matter of calling him up, telling him I got some wood and to try and work me into his schedule. That has really worked out good. He was just over last month cutting 2500 bf of softwood for me (for shop framing for my dad.)

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I've been super busy this year harvesting wood too. Not just for wood for my woodworking shop but mostly firewood. Everyone wants it this year. I have been going around the edges of my fields cutting back the trees so that they don't bust out the windows on the tractors. I flattened something like 54 cords just around the edges of the fields and have yet to make a dent on what's there.

Now normally I try and cut back to the rockwalls that are here, and sometimes it can be as far as 50 feet from the rock wall to the first row of corn that is planted which equates to a lot of loss in crops. This one field was funny. I found two rock walls. Apparently my great great grandfather or whatever had a hard time keeping up with encroachment too. You can see where the field was originally cleared in the 1810's, then another rockwall was started 50 years later or so. The trees had just encroached that much, so they just started a new rockwall and made the field a bit smaller.

Here is a picture of that field, taken in the winter time. You can easily see why I am trying to knock the trees back here.

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I did get out in the woods and cut down some nasty fir that needed to be culled. Around it was some nice Spruce that I want to grow. This was the first load of softwood I have cut in quite sometime so that was fun.

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Its been an interesting year. Firewood is high, but hardwood pulp is even higher right now, and even the waste wood like sawdust and slabs from the sawmills are being sold faster then it can be made. I am sitting on a bunch of firewood right now, but while a bunch of people want it, no one has any money. :(

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As for the farming side of things,that has been busy too. With 3 dairy farms in the family, two have stayed about the same size (27 cows for the small farm) (125 for the mid-sized farm) but the big farm has increased by over a hundred cows. (403 on the big farm) In total we are milking 555 cows on three farms, 24/7/365¼ days a year now.

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Naturally we can't get any help,so I have been milking a lot on the weekends and doing field work when I can. Super, super busy, but the price of milk is decent (1.52 a gallon) and is supposed to go up, grain is dropping in price, and we haven't had too many break downs so we are making money this year.

Surprisingly we have been given some relief from the fuel prices, not by the Gov, but by making some wise purchases. One was a tractor and disc harrow. We used to have a 100 hp tractor and 16 foot disc, but now have a 400 hp tractor pulling a 33 foot disc. It burns a lot of fuel, but gets so much more done. We were able to plant 800 acres of corn in 2 weeks time on 800 gallons of fuel, so that was a smart purchase.

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A haybine was another good purchase. Our old one was 10 feet wide while the new one is 16 feet. For every two passes we make now, we would have had to make 3 with the old one. Recently we flattened a 28 acre field of mine in 1 hour, 5 minutes. That is almost unheard of time wise.

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We are looking at getting a new barn as of right now. We have been battling it out with the Amish over a foreclosed farm that was up for sale, but the finance company (Dairy Farmers of America) has 1 million dollars in this huge farm and really wants to keep it farming rather then going to the Amish who have little use for the state of the art parlor. If we get that, that will really help us out milking wise, going from 12 cows at a time to 24 and should cut our milking time down. We just can't sustain these 24 hour shifts. But until we do, its been busy on the farm and doesn't look to be ending anytime soon.

Oh well, as my Grandfather used to say, you can't get into trouble when you are too busy working. We are just glad that with so many dairy farmers doing so poorly that we are having a decent year. Moving ahead, or at least holding steady on all three farms.
 
Travis

Why do the Amish have no use for the milking barn. That is the primary Amish way to make money down here. Do they not do Grade "A" milking up there. Down here being SE Pa.

Years ago when I worked in a milk plant in Mo., all the Amish did Grade "C" milking because they could do with less "modern" stuff. But out here there are plenty of modern tools and stuff used by the Amish outside of the house.

What I see around here is hardly anyone cuts their weeds. They just let them go to seed year after year. This is in the small area's of pasture they let the animals run on. No grass just weeds and wild brush and it gets worse every year. The farmers I grew up with in the midwest always tried to never let land get weeds started either pasture or row crop. My wife's grandfather up in Iowa even used a hoe in his corn (and I mean a hand hoe) to get any weed that sprouted out of his corn until he was well up in years. And you didn't even want to get him started on the crazy fellow that moved in and actually planted sunflowers as a crop..

Even in the parks around here they tend to cut the weeds after they go to seed..


Garry
 
Why do the Amish have no use for the milking barn. That is the primary Amish way to make money down here. Do they not do Grade "A" milking up there. Down here being SE Pa.

The Amish plan to milk 30 cows, but they are mainly coming here to grow veggies and sell them. The barn we are trying to buy is a state of the art milking parlor and costs over a million dollars to install...that's just the milking parlor. The barns and out buildings were just about as much. A finance trade group called Dairy Farmers of America tried to keep a farmer afloat and kept giving him money until he finally folded. They are looking to recoup some of their costs.

We are one of the few that can take over the farm and use it for its intended purpose. Since we are with the DFA as well, it would workout nicely. The problem is, the barn is located about 15 miles away. With the cost of fuel these days...having cows here and there could be problematic. We have crunched and crunched the numbers and just gave the DFA an even lower offer. I will be honest, we are trying to steal it and just might pull it off with the real estate market, plight of the dairy farmers and whatnot. The DFA has sat on this place for years and its still vacant so we might pull it off. Now don't get me wrong, we are not outright thieves, but if it does work out for us,there is no need to spend a few million dollars either.

What I see around here is hardly anyone cuts their weeds. They just let them go to seed year after year. This is in the small area's of pasture they let the animals run on. No grass just weeds and wild brush and it gets worse every year. The farmers I grew up with in the midwest always tried to never let land get weeds started either pasture or row crop. My wife's grandfather up in Iowa even used a hoe in his corn (and I mean a hand hoe) to get any weed that sprouted out of his corn until he was well up in years. And you didn't even want to get him started on the crazy fellow that moved in and actually planted sunflowers as a crop.

We don't have this problem on active ground. What I mean is ground we actively farm because we use dairy cow manure as fertilizer. Clover seeds and other high protein seeds pass through a cow unharmed, so when we spread it on fields, it actually overseeds the pastures every time we spread. You can see the ribbon of clover in the fields a year later and can see right where the trucks have traveled over the fields.

As for weeds in corn fields, they did away with that years ago.

Years ago we used to cultivate the corn. Now that broke up the weeds, but also broke up the ground too. That was in July when the corn was knee high. It also happens to be when the ground is very hot and dry. That is not a good time to be breaking up your ground. So then we went to spraying with herbicide to kill the weeds. That worked, but it took diesel fuel and had to be done by a subcontractor who was licensed to apply herbicide. Then they came out with the best innovation to us in the past 30 years...corn seed with herbicide already in it. It acts like a dandelion plant, it kills the grass out around the corn seed for just enough time for it to beat the weeds and really take root and grow. It literally saves us thousands of dollars. We till, we plant, we harvest...so in the summer we can do other things besides babysit corn stalks.

As for the corn itself, we are dairy farmers so we take everything, stalk, leaves, cob, etc. We grind it all up and the cows love to eat it, but our chopper does two things. First it chops the corn into very small bites (¼" pieces). This allows the corn to be converted into more milk production. At the same time, the cobs pass through a cracker that cracks the kernels open. Now how this does all this at about 120 pounds of feed a second, I do not know, but it brings a 450 hp engine to its knees doing so. Anyway the cracked corn lets us feed our cows less grain to get the same milk production, saving us money as well. And as you know, grain right now is about 650 bucks a ton, and Holsteins/Jerseys love grain.

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Getting this back to woodworking, I did a custom wooden model of the tractor posted above this post. I gave it to my Uncle and I thought he was going to cry. He kept saying how he could not believe how I had done all that work and was just going to give it to him. I really thought he was going to cry, he was just amazed and overwhelmed by it. Now if you take a look at the picture of him with Alyson, you can see that this guy is pretty darn tough. Not mean but tough as in hardy and not prone to show emotion.

Now keep in mind they ride for days in these machines and this wooden model was an exact replica. It was not a New Holland FX 450, it was HIS Fx 450 right down to the wooden bottles on the floor, the cb overhead and the logging chain in the buddy seat,all to scale size of course.

The latter part is funny because I just happened to be driving by one day and saw that he was stuck. So I went and got a chain so he could pull out his stuck dump truck. I told him, "when you look at this model in 10 years I wanted you to remember how we all work together to make the farm work, so I made sure that chain was in your model."

I've made a lot of wooden models as you guys all know, but that had to be one of the greatest recipients ever. He was just blown away by it. It came out good, but unfortunately,all the pictures of it came out crappy. There is just no way to capture all the details with a camera.

Here is a picture of Albert giving Alyson her first tractor ride ever. Hey we do things on a big scale here, even first tractor rides. Hint: look at the way he is looking at Alyson, I don't think he really minded. :)

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