The Saw

After last weekend's cutting board debacle, I went to Adaro in San Leandro and finally took the dive into the world of dismemberment and hospital visits: I bought a chainsaw. I had been avoiding it for a long time because, quite frankly, chainsaws scare me. My dad had used one extensively during the building of our cabin and it had been a source of some pretty near misses. In shopping for a saw, I recently discovered that the saw that he had bought was about as dangerous a saw as you could hope for: non-low kickback chain, no chain brake, no chain catcher and no rear handle. And it was too small and underpowered for the jobs he was using it for. It's a credit to him that he used it so productively and without maiming himself, but I have to wonder if that Stihl dealer didn't have something against Japanese people.

I bought a mid range Stihl saw (ms270) with the new anti-vibration system and an 18" bar. More importantly, I bought the chain jamming Stihl chaps as well as combo hardhat/face screen/ear protection. As per Stihl requirements, the guy at Adaro showed me all of the features, fueled and oiled it up and answered all of my questions.

So today I got to try the saw out for real: After playing the saw like a banjo as the Stihl website recommends:

I started by sawing into some rounds to make sure I could control the saw well and then moved on to cutting slabs for cutting boards. It took around three minutes per slab, so that's an improvement!



The saw is particularly good at cutting down saplings, so I was able to thin things out *a lot* near the cabin. It even makes limbing and bucking easy, although limbing seems like a good way to take a chain to the head.

Last weekend, Chloe and I found a huge tree that PG&E had cut down which looks like a cherry. It's hard to tell exactly what it is because it has been down for a while, but it looks like the "cherry" that we have seen on the property and is also right next to several other living "cherries". I put cherry in quotes because although its leaves and bark look like cherry trees, and some of them produce a small number of mini-cherries, these things generally get to be around 40-50 feet tall, which seems strange for a cherry. My guess is that its a Wild Cherry:Prunus avium.

In any case, the wood looks very nice, and I really hope it is Wild Cherry, because we have a wild cherrywood (Merisier in french) table that we bought in France which we really love. One of the reasons that I bought the saw was to be able to do some rough milling of this and other trees, so I got to work





The boards were a little warped, but I was getting the hang of milling by the end. The ear protection really helped with Kenji's constant jabbering, too.

I also ended up milling a big chunk of oak from a fallen tree. It is a live oak of some kind, and I'm fairly certain that it's a Canyon Live Oak. The wood looks beautiful and seems relatively termite-free.

The ultimate goal is to use the milled wood to make a French farmhouse style table. We weighted the cherry boards down to try to flatten them, so here's hoping it all turns out well. I'm planning on quartering the live oak chunk and using it for the legs.