hey there. i'm markerbuoy, and today i'm goingto drop this big douglas fir tree and the first stage of cutting the treedown is to do a v cut. now that's the v cut. and what the idea is,we're going to form a hinge, and the tree will fall perpendicular to theline of the hinge here. once i do the back cut, this tree is leaning heavily,and it will fall alone this as a fulcrum, as a hinge. turns out that this tree is pretty rottenup the middle, and there's some rotting on the side, so it wasn't long beforenature would have brought the tree down in a good windstorm or somethinglike that. now that we've bucked
up the lower part of this log, the butt endof the log, we've got to a point where the log is sound, nice tight rings,small knots, and we're going to buck it up in this case into a 14-footlength before we start to mill it. the first stage of milling it up with a chainsaw,using a fairly basic alaska mill rig, is to, you want to make sureyour first cut is straight. so to do that, what i use is just a commonergarden plank. my plank happens to be 16 feet long. i could have a 14 footplank or whatever works. regular two-by-six plank, this one happens to be pressuretreated, and i'm going to
use three inch screws to fasten it to thetop of the log. now i check for alignment. what's importantis to make sure that there's no twist in your plank and that the plank runsnice and flat. you don't want any dipsy doodles in your plank. so i justuse my eyeball to straighten it up. you can use a string, you could use alaser, but it's all too complicated and time consuming. i'm at the narrower end of the log. this log'sa pretty nice log. it's reasonably parallel, but as you can see, ican get my hand under the end of here, underneath the plank, so i could useall sorts of fancy gizmos. i'm
just going to use a stick to support the endof the log here, while i place the final screw, and it's not a permanentstructure. as long as this plank stays true throughout the first cut, that'sall we're interested in. the guide plank is firmly fixed to the topof the log now. one final check for alignment and it looks pretty good. we'renot making guitars here. this is raw lumber for construction purposes. somethingto point out is that i always try to arrange my logs sloping downhill.gravity is your friend when you're running an alaska mill. alaska mill is a very simple rig in essence.the basic idea is that it
clamps at each end of the saw bar and there'san adjustable guide, horizontal guide, for when you're slidingdown the plank, the guide plank, which you'll see me using in a second, butit's much easier, seeing is believing. today, i'm just going to be making my firstcut at a three and a half inch depth to make sure i clear my three inch screws.never operate a chainsaw without good hearing protection. now we get to see what kind of cut we've gotunderneath, and the quality of the wood that's inside. we're going to cutthe rest of the log now into one-
inch planks. the first board will come offafter the next cut, and then it will be just zip, zip, zip all the way downthe log. so, we'll just refuel. it's preferable notto run out of gas when you're in mid cut, but occasionally that happens. andi have found that it certainly extends the life of your bar to use the bestquality chain bar oil that money can buy. it's very expensive, but itpays off in the end. once the cut is established, i use my modifiedcycle inner tube to hold the throttle open. this allows me a more comfortableposture. it disconnects easily at the end of the run, or in case ofemergency.
this method works really well in remote locationswhere there aren't too many neighbors to annoy with the noise. it'snot for in the city. absolutely not. way too much noise. way toomuch mess. but in a situation like this where we have no roads, we haveno electrical power, no transportation, we can take the chainsaw millto the log, because we're unable to take the logs to any mill. so there we have it. eight really nice planksfrom that log. total time to produce, two to three hours. once we've trimmedoff the bark and straightened everything out, we'll have somereally good wood here for a
really nice floor.