I am cutting up some poplar that was dead standing and I am using the wood for a shed. I cut some wider ones to make shelves out of and when I opened the log up, it turned out to have all sorts of funky colors.




Milling lumber is interesting work, you never know what ya stumble across in a log

Poplar has that funky purple color in it but looks great with a light stain

Beautiful!!! I have always been intrigued with milling wood.

I can hardly wait to get my schedule cleared for some milling.

Enjoy, my friend.

Yea me too. I need some soft lum er. Had three white pine blow over in the last storm I'm going to cut up as soon as it dries out enough to get to them. Had a nice maple break off in Sept I'll be pulling out and cutting up too. I love maple lumber.

I have a empress tree near the pond that needs to come down. I googled it and supposedly it it a very light wood ...almost like balsa. I am going to mill that thing up and sticker it. I am thinking that it would be great for carving fishing lures out of.

With the new blade guide I made and a few little adjustments, the mill is now cutting straight as a laser. I cut some black oak boards and ran them through the planer to make a work bench top out of for the admirals shed.

Wow Michael...what gorgeous wood. Some blue in it and all.

Just cut the parts that are not a book case

Thats some nice work right there cotton.

I have to get used to using hand tools again to cut stuff away that is not what I want. When I built my last boat I was very fortunate that I had the use of some big CNC machines. So all I had to do is some dumpster diving at Spirit yachts, write the files for the stuff I wanted and plug that into a CNC mill or router and then glue the bits together that it made. Now I have to do all that stuff on foot as it were and its a new challenge altogether.

nice work, cotton!

(but I don't see any books...)

That looks like spalted wood it makes for some very nice looking wood but can be weak, I’m glad you got your mill up and running.

Having that thing built and running is a good step ahead for my plans here on my little patch of the world. Once the shed is done for the admiral, I'll start milling the lumber for the little barn and the house down at the spot where we want to be. Cutting posts, beams and joists etc. Milling up the walnut for the countertops make shiplap siding and a lot more. Its going to be busy around here in the foreseeable future whenever the weather lets me.

I found a bullet embedded in some poplar crown moulding I was
installing. I wondered if it messed up the cutters.

I made and sharpened the tooling for a company back in Germany that made moldings and broom handles and that sort of stuff. They used to buy oak from France and sometimes it had lead balls in it and iron shrapnel from the French civil war. The straight planing cutters with little stick out did ok with the lead balls. The profile cutter that stuck out a fair bit would shatter and those pieces would then get hit by the following ones and made a right mess. Needless to say, the iron shrapnel from the cannon balls did a number on any cutter that is came across.
Those moulding machines had 10 and some 12 spindles and a piece of iron could do a couple of grands worth of damage in the blink of an eye.
As an example, they could make 8 broom handles side by side, so the top and bottom cutters had 8 half rounds ground out of a half inch thick chunk of HSS steel. Making those cutters would take me the best part of a say.

Scuba, I have a circular mill, I love to saw lumber, build a roof over your mill sawing lumber is great rainy day work.

I would wear out the right glove first because I was always sweeping the sawdust off the top of the board I was cutting as I walked beside the mill looking at the cool grain.

I have no idea what it is, and if I say I like looking at my wood, people are going to take it the wrong way

But there is always a surprise hidden in every log. Going to have to take a stiff brush to the mill with me I think or my gloves are going to wear out like yours did.

Every time I cut open a log, its just like opening a Christmas present. You don't know what is inside. Even if it is box elder, or soft maple. I look foreword to being surprised.
Zookeeper

So I started taking cotton's advice and fired up the mill and a skill saw and cut away everything that wasn't shed extension and work bench for the admiral .... and it worked