Can This Three Year Old Hickory Still Be Valuable?

Take a good look at this hickory tree. It has been standing dead for about three years right now and it's at the point where this is a liability and it has to come down. But before we turn this into firewood, I always have one question. What's in the center of this log? Is this wood from this hickory tree still valuable? So this tree has been standing here for three years dead and what has happened to the inside of this log here is the wood good is the wood deteriorated is there bugs in this thing what could possibly be going on that killed this tree now if this was your tree would you mill it or would you turn it into the firewood let us know in the comments us we're gonna cut this down we're gonna throw it on the mill and we're going to find out what's going on in there here's hard my friend holy smoke nicely done man that was perfect the first luck we had jay was yeah and one of the reasons that i've been putting off cutting this tree down is because how close it is to the main water line into Timber Town and i was always afraid that yeah something's gonna happen i'm busting that pipe and today i'm gonna be doing plumbing so the luckiest portion of the day is no plumbing now this tree standing it was ridiculously hard i had a hard time chainsawing through it so i got another question for you guys with this tree standing being dead for three years is the tension going to be released something that we have to deal with with all of our fresh logs maybe the tension is gone out of here hickory normally does have a lot of tension now this log is looking promising one because it's hard but i can see on the opposite side there's a lot of bug holes and some rot over here which is probably what killed the tree it's more rot than i saw me too okay so you can see it right here on the end cut it's almost spalted all this stuff here i don't know how high up the tree goes but it looks like we should still be able to get some premium lumber off this so we're going to buck this up into some manageable sizes roll it on up to the Woodland Mills HD7 Hydro and see what we can get done see what wood is going to come out of this okay so we were lucky enough to get three 11 foot logs out of that one tree and a six foot piece here and you can see the base of this thing we are at 35 inches so we're gonna just be able to make it on our 36 in sawmill as you can see you now you kind of have a cross cut hey this is what i've got to work with um and you can see right here that this this wood was ridiculously hard for me to cut i know it being hickory is already hard but this is somewhat dry and i put a dry uh a moisture meter on this and i found out here on all the outside here everything was at 12 and we were at 42 still in the center but look at that i mean do you think that we're gonna make a comment do you think we're gonna get good wood out of that it almost looks like it's i want to say rotted but it's not this has already started to spalt so almost half of this here i'm assuming i'm not 100 sure that we're going to get a whole bunch of spalted boards from end to end so i decided we're going to put this one up on the sawmill first before we cut into Big Bertha here she's a 22 inch wide one and it's pretty straight so So before I waste my time cutting in here, let's find out what, let's bring it over to the mill and let's find out what we actually got in there. The best part for me is that I'm not cutting this for a project. So as we put it up on the mill, I'm going to be able to maybe change my mind. Do I cut three inch slab? Do I see something cool that I want to make a tabletop out of? Do I cut three inch slab? Do I cut one inch pieces? My first impression, I was thinking I was going to cut one-inch boards for T&G, which I still might do, because spalted T&G, if this comes out good, beautiful, beautiful stuff. We did a lot of it on our wood floors, so I'm hoping we get something good out of this. But I think that if we had left this up for another year, we might have just got to the point where we're still going to get something good. But we're not going to know until we saw into it. okay so let's talk about how we would set up our log to get the most wood from it and uh it's not as simple with this particular log but we tried to center the pith of this log here and i'll show you why because most of the most of the issues that we're having right here is that we have a double heart here so we're not exactly sure you know uh where the center is now there is a slight center check right here in the center which is where i put the laser that's how i that's how i determined for mine to be uh so that the pith is level when we're doing this now would you you tell me would you change the position of this log or would you just leave it exactly how it is now i'm using it and and for me the reason that i got lucky we rolled this thing up here and the little check mark that here is running kind of perpendicular so for me either i would put it just like this the way that it is or roll it completely 90 degrees so when we're making our cant we can work and get our boards off but let me know if this is something that you would do different or if you haven't thought about that so real simple i think it's time for us to run the blade on this oh boy it's secured it's ready to go i just need to pick how high and since it's spalted i might i might go right to the top my friend you want to see what it looks like i do want to see what it looks like i want to see what it looks like now we're not going to just jump right in and go hey this board's good this board's bad this board's good we're going to see how much usable lumber we get and how much time we spend to get it are you showing a sneak peek jay you show a sneak peek were you showing a sneak peek maybe a little got a little interesting gadget going on there i do and i'm not exactly sure yet this is the first day first time we're cutting anything with this i'm gonna bring this to a solid number normally you know how i would do it jay normally yep i would measure this down into one inch which there i go i'm at seven so i really don't need to change this but i'm going to start by taking small boards off and then i'm actually going to uh start cutting some some some small one bites jay yep i'm anxious to see what we get let's do this we didn't even warm her up today it hasn't been running for months for a sec there we go it cut really really nice did it you like that blade already i do well first cut and for a log like this a hickory log under no circumstance would i just put on a a regular blade, a re-sharp blade or anything. We would normally cut our hickory or super hard wood with a custom-made carbide blade that I get for all of you guys. And I get special discounts from my members. So if you're thinking about trying carbide blades at the best price, I've tried them all. And these are the ones we've been using for the last few years. And this is what I would normally normally cut my hickory with without even a question i pulled it out because that's what it was i feel it getting harder it's a good sign though right what's up it's actually solid dry wood jay that's awesome i want to say i got the blowers definitely a little dip right there yeah i can see that yeah quite a bit going on right there there is but actually look at the bugs are coming out of it right now this is all ants um very cool all right he is definitely getting his eviction notice let's just remind you of brazil it reminds me of the amazon the same they look the same they're not fried though i'm not doing it so we've actually we're getting cut out of the sapwood here and you can see we're about getting into the center hardwood this stuff is it is ridiculously dry and ridiculously hard so with these carbide blades you can see we're getting a flat or flatter smoother cut to our wood so when we go to plane this stuff we don't have to worry about dips and drabs we did get some pull off here we're going to see if we're able to do that but honestly we're getting some decent wood that i'm going to continue cutting i'm not going abort the mission and make firewood just yet what would you guys do would you stop i mean me i like this rustic look i like the bug holes i do like when the caterpillars are no longer in the wood all this is going to go in the kiln so i'm not too worried about that i'm gonna give it a flip jay and let's get another side off all right so we've got all of uh let's say the wane off of this and we've got ourselves a 12 by 12 cant and actually on the width of this i made this 12 and a half so after everything is dry and if it does move we can straighten it out and i'm still going to have 12 inch boards or 11 and a half inch boards i'm going to be really close but uh honestly this wood is more solid than i thought that it was and it feels and it feels like when we're moving through it that it's completely dry um me i love all of these bug holes oh yeah uh we've only seen the caterpillar so i'm not exactly sure so what do you think if we're gonna actually have more bugs as we get into the center of this because this can't right now is laid out and i'm just gonna make one by one or one inch stock out of it one by twelves but you can see I rolled our cant back to where my crack here is vertical. So I might lose one piece here. I might drive down to here. I might flip back over to it. I'm not sure until I get there. But that's going to give us the most boards that we have. And I'm trying to figure out, are we going to lose this spalting? Are we going to get to the center and are we going to have standard hickory looking stuff? Or are we actually going to be spalted all the way through? I'm gonna say spalted. You think spalted? No, not all the way through. But what do you guys think? Yeah, that's more important I'm thinking we're gonna get some brown. I really believe once we get down to the heart of this thing. We're gonna get some brown This is the center portion of the tree So our large portion or big bertha over there a little bit closer to the bottom looks like it has more rot But so far if the rest of this comes out the way that it is coming out We're gonna put him up there to see what happens So I'm halfway cut through this cant with our one buys and and you can see without even me Showing you I mean how flat how straight the cuts are now I'm not gonna reveal the new toy that we're playing with but every one of these cuts is Perfectly accurate perfectly the same. I know it's hard for me to show you here on a ruler ruler but that's actually going to speed up our process and we'll get a video out of what we're playing with here I don't want to do anything until we test it and make sure that it runs right but in the beginning of this video I asked you I said is it dead standing tree what do you think is a dead standing tree have less tension than a tree that you've just cut down and wanted to saw you can see how everything is laying flat there was a tiny bit of tension right here on this top board so as far as hickory goes if you guys have cut a lot of hickory tons of tension all the time bowing pulling up as you're sawing you're actually watching boards sometimes lift so so far this dead standing one has been pretty good to us and uh i think it looks beautiful i haven't seen the middle let's see you guys want to show everybody what the middle looks like let's see what we're dealing with so we can decide if we're going to continue this little hickory day and that's not even the middle good there we go that's where we're hearing you can actually hear the motor slow down there's a pretty good size knot right there but i told you we're getting into some of of the browns no that's gorgeous so we're actually losing you can see we're losing the spalted we're losing there's it seems to be no real bug activity in the center of this log that is gonna be hard hickory hard yeah I like to call I'm going all the way so yeah not much spalting left just a little around the edge it's still beautiful so it looks like the these should be ambrosia powder these should be powder post beetles yeah i really believe all the black that's what that should be, that's what these little guys are, i think right, that's generally that, yeah i'm not sure if that's a bug or just a natural, just a natural crack because we're in the center of the board, i don't know, it's pretty good looking, it's really good looking, i can see some cabinets made out of that, i can see some cabinets made out of that, wall planking, flooring, i can see plenty of cabinets made out of that so so far with our dead standing oak wasn't firewood at this point yet, this is only one log we got three, the top which should have more tension and the bottom which looks like it has more rot, but we're gonna get this stuff stacked onto our pallets, i'm gonna finish cutting this and let's get up big boy and see what the rot looks like in that guy, so what i could say is the first log was definitely not a waste of time, it was the best of all three but we still have a ton of these spalted boards, we just need to edge and get set up but we ended up with 11 12 inch boards, 12 by 10, 11 inches, 11 feet long, 12 inches wide nice looking stuff, so we're gonna get Big Bertha on over here, we're gonna see if uh she can produce as many boards as they can because this so far has not been a waste of time cutting an old dead log so you're zeroed yeah we should just be able to cut now all right so once you get past here yeah hit go to zero okay and then you'll take ah okay that's right go to zero that's it all right well this thing's cutting really nice the blade yeah yeah all right here we go you did hear us calling termites down here what termites in the wood down it's heavy i'm gonna here might have to go right up oh nice okay i don't know if this little guy will pick all this up one two all right notice what tree that is i gotta flip it okay short work of that yeah so after cutting i'm calling a big bertha we just had a couple of pieces right here on the end that had termites into it and this is the stack that we're going to have to edge but look at the beautiful wood that came out of that i all i can say is that i am super surprised of how nice this wood is, did you guys let me know when it comes, did you think that old rotten dead tree was going to produce wood like this, i didn't actually think so i thought it'd be more spalted than this, a lot of this stack looks just like that i didn't think we were going to get it this nice i didn't think we were going to get it this nice either that's a big stack too, it is a healthy stack so we're going to actually finish cutting the last one that we had which is the top and we're gonna go up to this little piece and then we'll show you what we actually salvaged out of the one dead tree i'm gonna say quite a bit but we'll see what everybody, so far it's quite a bit for a dead tree i'm loving it well there you have it this hickory has been dead standing for about three years and if you can see we got a beautiful stack of hickory boards from here, not to mention 660 feet of beautiful boards so we did get some spalted pieces but not rotted solid I wasn't sure that we were going to be able to get solid wood out of this and the amount that we actually got there was a lot less I want to say there was a lot less rot and there was a lot less bugs than I thought I mean we did have a little bit but not much so I guess the question that I've got for all you guys is would you have cut this tree down and would you have milled it and more importantly what would you build with it so let us know in the comments because i think we proved that this dead hickory was definitely worth milling and not firewood Not firewood.