We got a call a few weeks ago from our friend - Bruce Hardt of Hardt's Sawmill. He had a line on a massive Burr Oak tree that came down by Muscatine, Iowa. He said they already cut up the trunk into pieces, so I didn't think much of it. And the pictures showed metal in the trunk so I expected most of the wood to be firewood. However, I was wrong. This was one of the biggest white oaks I have worked with to date.
We loaded up the trunk and a few of the larger branches and headed home. Two full trailer loads.
Now for the fun part. We unload the trailers and start loading the logs on the sawmill. We run a Woodmizer LT15 wide sawmill. This allows us to cut these 40"+ wide logs. We had to do a little trimming but ended up getting through all of the big trunks. We cut them into 2.5" thick single slabs.
Here are some of the slabs we ended up with:
We made a video below of the process of turning this tree into usable slabs.
