Successful loading and slabbing a 3000lb Elm tree- Urban logging/Hud-Son Forest Equipment Warrior Portable Sawmill

Good morning, my name is Nick some of you may have watched one of my prior videos where I attempted to place a large elm tree on my Hudson warrior mill. I was unsuccessful but today we going to get a similar tree and I have a new plan. Yeah that looks good so in this clip here you’ll see me cutting what’s referred to as cookies in the woodworking world. These are cross cut sections that can be used for tables or something like that the max distance between my guides on my mill is 31 inches this piece that I’m cutting right here is sitting about 35 inches. This tree on my trailer is at about 12 feet in length. The max that I can get on my mill is 10 feet long so this is the way that I can basically keep cutting these off. I ended up cutting three and then I get it right to where I wanted length wise so I can get the maximum yield for the cookie pieces as well as keeping the tree as long as I can for slapping it out which we’ll see here in just a second. I also wanted to take a second to give a shout out to my buddy Mike from Battleborn Tree Service in Carson City, Nevada. If you’re located in the Reno Carson or Lake Tahoe area you should definitely check him out. He does great work and he’s a huge help to me hooking me up with these big trees. Thanks Mike!

All right without further ado the big surprise of this video is how I’m gonna get this tree on the mill. It actually removing the mill head of all the ideas that I had this one actually seems the easiest. I really didn’t do a great job prepping the pallet jack here as you can see I put two little clamps but it got it off safely. In the future I have a better idea of how to get it attached and overall I’m going to call it a success for getting the mill safely out of the way so we can get the trailer back. Don, which you’ll see here in this next clip so here I’m just showing you the tree that the strap goes to it actually goes underneath my log deck and then comes out where it’s chained around the tree. You’ll see me when I start to pull this off. I’m not too concerned about this button that we’re looking at because those seem to land softly it’s the other end that I’m concerned about if that heavy 3,000 pound log just lands directly on the mill it’s basically going to probably bend it and then completely throw it out of calibration so what you’re going to see me do here is straighten it and then on the other end. I’m going to set up some cribbing which successfully catches the other

half of that low and I know people have suggested using pipe to get it on and off.

Here’s the problem once the tree is on the trailer I can’t lift it because of the design of the log arch and I really don’t want to put pipe underneath it while I’m traveling on the freeway because I don’t want any risk of it coming off.  So you’ll see here the successful catch of the load with this cribbing you so you can see on the side of the log to the right that I’ve shaved off some of to it with a carbide grinding disc. I didn’t do enough which is why the mill is kind of catching here. If you don’t give enough space for the sawdust to eject out of it kind of bogs it down a little bit so I pushed it through which probably isn’t the best thing for the guides or the mill. The subsequent cuts after this that are not in this video. I ended up taking that carbide grinding disc and giving it about 3/4 of an inch on either side of the guide in that way it performs much better.  So some of you haven’t seen my last video the product that I use to keep my slabs stacked tight and straight is called Cuban ex trapping and it’s a nylon base material that has these buckles here that you thread the material through and then you ratchet it like this and you can get this really tight almost like a piano string and some people were upset that it’s a plastic product and then it will ruin the earth but the good thing is it’s reusable.  So not only can you retighten it with a little side ratchet or if you stack this up but if you were to break it and pull slab out of here you can easily really reel OOP this through this buckle and use it again so it has a lot of life in it you can see here how tight it is at keeping everything in a line so this other stack here I did not use the Cuban for manic strapping on because I didn’t have it yet and you can see don’t look at these top three pieces they don’t really count because the they were milled with the chainsaw and the ladder moved on the deck but these ones down

here you can see that if you don’t put the stickers in the right place where I didn’t and you don’t keep them tight you get a lot of movement variation on the end so I’m really happy with the new

product and the new strapping it definitely seems to be keeping things a lot tighter and cleaner so in this next clip here you’re gonna see me successfully stack two of my log stacks on top of each other this is something that I’ve been kind of thinking about in my mind of how I would do it and it would obviously increase the capacity around my narrow driveway that I could store material and having a forklift would be ideal to do this operation but I don’t have the money to buy one or two maintenance an old one that I’d buy off Craigslist or eBay so I was pretty pleased with you’ll see here just a little ingenuity and a little bit of planning and I was actually able to successfully get him on there and I thought it was relatively safe looking at the operation afterwards so I’m happy that this worked and I’m gonna keep doing it to decrease the footprint around my property you alright well we’ve arrived at the end of this video and I hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I enjoy making them and hopefully I have inspired at least one person to go out there and possibly mill their own lumber for their woodworking projects because it is definitely a blast I really do enjoy doing it and these videos allow me to share the journey with you so please subscribe if you haven’t already done so and I hope you have a great day thank you