I've been referring to "milling" quite a bit in this blog, and I realize I haven't actually said much about the process, which distinguishes my whole approach from that of most other builders. Typically you just buy wood, cut it, and install it, and this makes sense for a lot of projects, but as I have mentioned, when the stuff that you demo'd is precious (both expensive and of higher quality than you can buy today), then I am willing to put up with some nail holes and slight blemishes for the sake of the tight grain of using old-growth and not letting it find its way into landfill.
The process starts with the demolition--where a crew might just go in and destroy the old wood, tossing it into a dumpster for speed (what Tim G and his boys did on the Big House siding, even when I offered to pay them out of my own pocket to salvage the gorgeous old shiplap siding, which they replaced with green crap that is bleeding through the paint-over, just ten years later), I take advantage of the deteriorated underpinnings and lift the redwood boards out with nails still either attached or Sawzalled off.
Then it's piled on the badminton court for de-nailing. This is what's left--thousands of nails (and bits of tar paper that had protected the joists), removed with the tools to the lower right: hammer, cat's-paw, 1/4" punch, and fulcrum-scrap for leverage. If you just cat's-paw the nail-heads out, you leave a huge gash in the top surface, so I use the punch to break the connection between the head and the wood, and then pound the nails or nail-fragments out enough to get the claw of the hammer in securely and with minimal damage.
After schlepping the stack of de-nailed boards down to the shop (the saw is too damned heavy to move, and besides I have built an outfeed table onto it--and hey, where else can you do this when it's raining outside?), it's time to run them through to trim off the decayed rough edges. Because these boards were not subjected to as much wet as the ones I dealt with at the Big House, I only shaved off a saw-kerf or so--turning 5 1/2-inch boards into 5 1/4-inch. The ones with bad knots or checks became 4" deck boards, or 2 3/4" stair-tread mids, or 1 7/16" pickets. And yes, that is a push stick--I never EVER get my hand past that spinning blade...
It takes a while to make pile of sawdust like this under the saw, and yes, I do wear a dust mask, since I haven't figured out how to make my dust collection / shop vac work here (it does with the planer though, see below).
This planer has become my workhorse--I had bought a slightly fancier one to replace Muggs' old Delta (for which parts are no longer available)--but it developed a weird and so-far-undiagnosable electrical problem (sometimes it runs great, then it stops for no reason) so I ended up having to buy another one to finish the Big House deck. I take care not to shave more than 1/32" at a time (half a turn on the knob)--this means lots of passes through the machine, but longer life and fewer problems. To the right you can see the ever-growing pile of off-cuts from the milling process--kindling for years to come. The hose goes to a chip-collector in line with my shop-vac.
To figure out where to start and stop the planing, I made myself a feeler gauge, as the boards are all over the place in terms of thickness: some of the ones from Doffy's deck were 1 5/8" thick, a typical piece of lumber that is "nominally" 2-by is 1 1/2" thick, and sometimes even less, and even with our tight joist spacing I don't use anything thinner than 1 7/16" on decking. Sometimes it takes extra planer passes to get past the gouges and fissures, but 1 3/8" makes perfectly acceptable picnic tables so I keep it for that purpose.
Just for fun I emptied my planer chip-collector drum in the same place, and have these impressive piles to show for it.
With the boards sized and smoothed, the last step is to dress the top two edges, and I move them off the planer and onto the sawhorses so that I can run my hand router / laminate-trimmer with a roundover bit on it. This is a totally cool little item that has a 1/4" radius cutter spinning vertically, and below it is a small disc roller that follows the flat edge of the board and keeps the roundover running evenly and neatly, as long as proper pressure and speed are maintained.
And as if by magic, the boards get schlepped back up over the badminton court and down to the job site! Here's what awaits me tomorrow: on the left, 38 stair tread boards (4 1/2" wide by about 39" long), then in the middle, 19 stair tread skinnies (2 1/2" x 39"), and on the right, about 50 of the pickets (1 7/16" square, about 30" long). I'll bolt the chop saw to a piece of plywood as a table, and then screw in a couple of stops so I won't have to measure after the first one. I've already cut 3" x 12" strips of Vycor membrane for the stair stringers, so I hope to have upper stairs finished before I have to leave for my tutorial tomorrow afternoon. There will have to be some notching of the boards to accommodate the posts, but I think the results will be worth the extra work. Milling!
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