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Todd Celmar

wood sculpture
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Todd’s Blog:

Thoughts and stories from rural Ohio.


Featured posts:

Featured
 Door commission, Honduran Mahogany
 Untitled - Honduran Mahogany
 Ten Perspectives on Human Nature, Black Walnut
  Rivers  - Padauk wood
 landscape, Black Walnut
 Pillars of Rubble, Black Walnut
  pillar
 pillar
 Seder Plate, Maple, Bowls by Matt Haver
 untitled - Black Cherry
forest.jpg

Rolling Logs Uphill

October 19, 2018

When people know you carve wood, they offer you free wood. A guy in Gambier offered me two bitternut hickory trees that came down in his woods during a storm; both with long, straight, thick trunks. All I needed to do was chainsaw them into logs, mill them into boards, and haul them off. Easy-peasy.

 I enlisted a neighbor, who is an avid woodworker and owns a portable mill (that one can hitch to the back of a pick-up truck), to help me out. Steve and I rode down to Gambier a few weeks ago. With his mammoth chainsaw, he cut five 8ft long logs from one tree. We pivoted the trunks up a small muddy incline to his portable mill (which had to rest on flat land), using polls with a sharp point at the end and a movable hook. The point and hook allowed one to exert leverage to roll the log up hill. Standing behind the log at each end, we alternated pivoting the log up the slope, then placed them in rows.

 Then Steve got the machine started. We rolled a log onto the metal arms along the ground. The arms lifted the log and set it on a long shaft. He set the depth of the cut and walked the arching metal and band-saw blade across the length of the log. He shaved off the bark first. Then he cut the boards at a 1.75 inch depth. The machine rotated the log a couple times to shave off more bark. I slid each newly cut board off of the machine as Steve pulled back the movable blade. I stacked the boards next to the barn. Got 30 boards out of it, mostly 8 to 10 inches wide, 8 ft long. A few weeks later, we came back to haul them up to the homestead. Stacked them in the garage with a rotating fan on them constantly.

← Outhouses, no cars
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email: todd.celmar@gmail.com