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Fine Hardwood Furniture

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Andrew Pitts ~ FurnitureMaker

Work in Progress
Milling a Holly Tree

Article Completed 24 March 2010


Disclaimer: This discussion chronicles the milling of a tree into lumber for furniture in my workshop. My intention is to bring the reader virtually into my shop to generally see how I do the work and share in my thought processes. Although I try to point out how the tools work and the applicable safety considerations, this discussion is not intended to be a text on how to work with tools, nor how to execute operations with the tools shown. I am not providing instruction in woodworking methods. Woodworkers attempting to imitate my methods do so at their own risk.
Click on images to enlarge
Holly tree
                    My friend Bud talked to me last year about taking down a dying holly tree in his yard so I could turn it into lumber. I was interested immediately, because holly is one of my favorite woods to use when I need a light and delicate look. Holly is very light in Tree topcolor, almost white, and has a tight grain. It bends well (I do a lot of bent laminations) and finishes nicely. It's tough to get wide boards from holly trees growing around here, but Bud's tree had some years on it and it looked like I might be able to get eight inches width or better. And he pointed out that the crown of the tree was a twisted mass of branches that surely would make interesting lumber. I asked that he e-mail me a photo or two of the tree, and this is what he sent. As you can see, the crown of the tree was dying off, but the wood was still sound. The twisted mass of branches forming the base of the crown was certainly unusual, as odd a growing pattern as I've seen, and I agreed that this might make some unusual lumber. Had I been a sculptor, I might have attempted to make a large outdoor sculpture by simply pruning the branches back, but I'm a furniture maker so I chose to mill some lumber, instead.


Geese on the water
            The whiteness of holly lumber depends on the season it is cut, or so I've found in my research. My only past experience was with holly cut in spring, so to test the theory I asked Bud if I could wait until the dead of winter to cut the tree. He agreed, so on a very cold and windy Chesapeake Bay day I hitched up the trailer, sharpened the saws, and headed over to Bud's place near the Potomac river at the mouth at the Bay. Upon arrival, I was greeted by hundreds of Canadian Geese in the fields near Bud's house, and they soon moved to the creek feeding the Potomac. I can tell you that it was COLD, and I have to respect these birds for their ability to swim in that freezing water! Ouch! But even more impressive was Bud's patience and perseverance with the camera as he photographed me working. I was plenty warm as I kept moving, but every time Bud stopped hauling branches to take these pictures, he was feeling the full brunt of the cold wind ... and so was his expensive camera!


Tree downLimbing tree
             On to the work at hand. The first thing I did was to fell the tree. A relatively short tree, it made little sense to limb the crown while the tree was standing as it would be a soft and well cushioned fall when the tree came down. With the tree on the ground, I set to limbing it. There were a lot of limbs and it took quite a while to get them off and piled so they could later be removed. This tree looked like it was a good one!



                Getting logs from the work site to the shop is tough, but it used to be much tougher. I used to have to load my tractor on the trailer, drive it to the work site and offload it, then use the tractor to load the logs onto the trailer. This worked well, except that now there were logs on the trailer so I could not reload the tractor. Hmmm.... I would have to drive the logs home, one Rolling the logat a time attach them to a tree with a chain and yank them off the trailer as I drove forward, then go back to the work site to recover the tractor. What a waste of time! And pretty much impossible to do if the work site was any distance from my shop. A couple of years ago I installed an electric winch on the trailer. Now, with the winch I can haul up onto the trailer pretty much any log I could ever consider fitting on my mill, and when I return to the shop my tractor is waiting to offload the log(s). So, at Bud's I moved the trailer in place so that the trunk could be winched up onto the bed. Using a Peavey, which is a stout handle attached to a heavy steel hook arrangement I rolled the log into place so it was more Winching log onto trailerof a straight shot up the trailer ramp. Then I hooked up the winch electrically to my truck battery. This winch draws a lot of current, so I had made up a on the trailerbig fat welding cable to stretch from the battery under the hood back to the winch. That keeps the voltage at the winch as high as possible so the winch will run a bit cooler. OK, I'm getting too deep in the electrical part .... a hold over from teaching electrical engineering in the Navy. Sorry. Anyway, I hooked my logging tongs (like old fashioned ice tongs) to the log and with a little finesse pulled it up onto the trailer. After chaining it down, it was off to the shop.



            I had not planned to mill the log immediately. In fact, since last fall I had accumulated quite a collection of cherry, walnut, and maple logs to be milled and was just waiting for a good window in the work schedule to do the week's worth of milling. Then the snowstorms of 2010 befell the east coast. Still greenI think it snowed four times altogether -- in eastern Virginia! I spent more time with the tractor plowing snow in the driveway (it's a very long driveway) and my Church parking lot than I did woodworking, it seemed. So, it wasn't until March that my shop work gave me a breather and the snow had melted, and then I did a lot of saw milling. I saved the holly to last because I wanted to give it special, unhurried Ready to millattention. The first thing I noticed about the logs was that there was a pair of healthy green leaves growing out the side of one of the log sections! The log had been felled for two months. This holly was really hardy! I loaded the log sections onto the mill with the tractor, and the section with the crown - the section that we thought would make the most interesting lumber - had to be shimmed on one end to make it level. My sawmill, a WoodMizer LT15 is a horizontal band saw, so the log is held stationary and level while the saw blade travels through the log. Once I was satisfied that the log was stable, I started Saw millingto mill it into lumber. I decided to mill this log to 5/4 lumber, which is 1-1/4" (plus a little) thick. The crown did make interesting lumber, but the grain pattern, which is very confused, will not be really evident until the wood is dry. It may crack some during drying, as the fibers going in every direction pull and strain against each other. I loaded the boards in a drying stack with a drying roof to air dry until there is room in my solar kiln to fit the stack. I already Drying Stackhad a load of 12/4 Solar Kilncherry (OK, how thick is that? Answer: 3" plus a little bit) in the kiln and there was a similar stack of cherry waiting to go in before this stack. In the photo at left, the holly is the top few layers, on top of walnut, which is on top of maple. When its turn comes around, I will charge the kiln just like you see in my "stock" kiln photo at right. Now, I'm just hoping for the best!