Garden Bench Build

When we moved to the farm, I knew there was plenty of wood for firewood or woodworking, but I wasn't exactly sure how to process it into lumber, or whether I'd cut down live trees for that purpose or only use fallen or dying trees. It probably took a year of thinking about it to reach an informed decision.

There's more wood than I could possibly use for either purpose in dead and dying trees throughout the property. The log shown in the picture to the left is from a maple tree that fell across our creek in the past year or two. The tree isn't huge, but it supplied a large amount of material for projects.

I milled it with a Stihl 056 chainsaw that I bought from a guy who offered it on Craigslist. The 056 is a powerful saw (87 cc engine) that is late 1980's vintage. It seems like a very common problem with the Stihl 056 is that the ignition system goes bad after all those years. When the saw gets hot, the ignition stops working and the saw just cuts out. When it first happened, I thought the saw was flooding, but I noticed the spark was really feeble, even when the saw was cold. I had the ignition replaced with a modern one--the most difficult aspect of that project was finding a compatible flywheel.

Once the ignition worked, the saw was really reliable and powerful. It can cut through 10' of hard maple with a ripping chain in less than 10 minutes per cut. When cutting 2" slabs, it takes about an hour to mill up a log like the one shown above. (not counting all the setup, cleanup, etc... time)

Chainsaw milling is very labor intensive, even when everything goes according to plan. It's also really hard on all the equipment involved. The chainsaw is running wide open for a long time. Even the mill suffers a lot of vibration and abuse. The chains get dull rapidly and you need to pay a lot of attention to the condition of the whole rig to minimize down time.

The lumber has a lot of character that's imparted by the milling process itself. The chainsawed faces have a unique texture and patina that builds up as the wood dries. It's difficult to maintain that character for most woodworking projects, since it's usually necessary to obtain regular faces of the material before assembling it into a piece of furniture or using it in construction.

I have done a couple of experiments with this material over the past year or so. The slabs really aren't completely dry. They're probably at the half-way mark and will probably only be ready for fine work next fall after they roast in the woodshop attic.

I maintained the live edges on a slab and cut some recesses for legs on the bottom of the slab, and used 1" dowels to help reinforce the joint. The legs are 4x4" and the glue area is large, so the legs are very strong and required no cross braces. I finished the bench with tung oil, and charred the bottom of the legs with a torch. It's out in the garden now.