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standing dead pine

Started by hunterbuild, February 13, 2012, 09:00:28 PM

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hunterbuild

I picked up two loads of pine today. 20 some logs, 14" to 22" x16'. they were beetle hit. The needles were red. They are dry but still solid. They are cutting very nice. Are there any strength issues? The mills wouldn't take them so I get them free. This first batch will be used for paneling walls and ceiling. They have the blue stain from the beetles. I will be using some as beams also.

Magicman

You are OK with that lumber, structural and otherwise.  Commercial sawmills will not take it because they really have no way of knowing how "dead" it is.  They can get all of the fresh that they need so why bother.

I have stated before that beetle killed SYP is what keeps me in business.  Farmers and landowners have a few trees to die, they can not sell them and do not want to see them go to waste, so I get a call.  It's just a nitch market.

I have sawed framing lumber for homes from beetle pine.  Check my Cabin Addition thread in the General Woodworking board below.  All of the lumber that I have used is beetle pine.
Knothole Sawmill, LLC     '98 Wood-Mizer LT40SuperHydraulic   WM Million BF Club Member   WM Pro Sawyer Network

It's Weird being the Same Age as Old People

Never allow your "need" to make money to exceed your "desire" to provide quality service.....The Magicman

pineywoods

Ditto what MM says. Most of the logs I saw are standing dead pine. The only sure way to tell if it's still good is to put a saw blade to it. Some will rot in a few months, others still good after a year or more. The blue is from a fungus, has nothing to do with rot....


PS
Don't worry about the bark being gone either. Don't seem to have much to do with what the inside is like.
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hunterbuild

Thanks guys. The cabin addition post was great, I have a lot of building to do and it give me much encouragement. The logs I can get unlimited.

wannasaw

I agree. I sawed one this weekend from a neighbor.50yr old 24 "rings the size of a pine straw" due to sawyers and rot only got 2 16' 6x6 one 12' 6x6 and 2-2x8's and 2-2x6's glad to have it! I built(frame) a 12 x32 porch with the same free trees and it had nails bending.There was the slighest bluing.  I've put some others on the saw and threw them away also but that is due to my lack of experience. I'm still learning. He also did me the favor of showing me an 80 yr. old that's alive and well about 36''. He called it a black pine? Any info as never heard that term before.
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Magicman

Notice the log ends when you buck it.  The growth rings should be smooth across the log.  The further the sapwood has pulled away from the rings the worst it is.  Really punky logs will have deeply sunken in growth rings and will have lost structural strength.  Foresters have the proper names to call it but look and you will see what I am describing.

Also, if you see patches of orange on the lumber, especially where the bark has held on, discard it and slab deeper.  Also slab below any pencil size sawyer holes.
Knothole Sawmill, LLC     '98 Wood-Mizer LT40SuperHydraulic   WM Million BF Club Member   WM Pro Sawyer Network

It's Weird being the Same Age as Old People

Never allow your "need" to make money to exceed your "desire" to provide quality service.....The Magicman

WDH

Wannasaw,

I have heard loblolly referred to as "black pine", but there is no such thing as "black pine" unless you are in Japan, and I have been all over the state and have never been to or heard of Japan, Georgia  :).  Locals do as locals do.
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Magicman

This is clearly a SYP log that you do not want to waste your time sawing.  The only sound wood is in the lower left quarter.  In the center at 3 o'clock you can see the sunken growth rings.  The majority is even further gone than that.


 
Knothole Sawmill, LLC     '98 Wood-Mizer LT40SuperHydraulic   WM Million BF Club Member   WM Pro Sawyer Network

It's Weird being the Same Age as Old People

Never allow your "need" to make money to exceed your "desire" to provide quality service.....The Magicman

Bandmill Bandit

I did 2 and 1/2 loads (tri axel trailer) of tree length logs like that for a customer summer 2010. Biggest logs were 36 to 38 inch butts and most were 60 to 80 feet long. If I remember right there was around 40 ton on a load. Smallest butt was just over 24 inch.

I cut for grade on the best logs for stairs railings and  such in his house, the wrap around porch/decks and then for "artistic content" as defined by the customer for his flooring, wall and ceiling paneling in a timber frame house. We worked real diligently to maximize the blue stain for the wall and ceiling paneling planks. Also worked to maximize possible "cat face" type anomalies for the floor. All in all it was a lot of fun and turned out real nice in his house. The logs were not real dry and most still were at about 26 to 28% by moisture meter. Some were under just 20% by a bit.

Think we ended up with just under 12MBF total of finished lumber on the job and left a few logs that he wanted for other projects on the property.

Wasn't too much lumber that was really spoiled by the beetle effect at all that didn't get used in some way by either himself or his wife with some artistic goal in mind.

They were quite a couple in a lot of ways but the artsy side was truly unique. Rare to see 2 people so artistic in such different ways and yet able to combine it for a unique beauty in a finished home. and they didn't fight about it either.

Her use of  shading, stains, color and paint to draw out the character in the wood and tie it in to the other materials was truly astounding. 

Skilled Master Sawyer. "Skilled labour don't come cheap. Cheap labour dont come skilled!
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Ianab

The "Black Pine" sounds like a local name, but I have found 4 species called that.
Pinus nigra (European)
Pinus thunbergii (The Japanese one that WDH referred to)
Matai and Miro (NZ species that aren't even pines)

But it's pretty unlikely you have any of those, although Pinus nigra is apparently naturalised in some parts of the States, and considered an invasive weed here. ::)

Ian
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slider

hunterbuild you can almost watch the color of the saw dust as you are cutting this dead stuff and tell what to keep and what needs to go on the slab pile.   al
al glenn

bandmiller2

Hunter,a little off subject but avoid lightning struck pines they will have a streak running down the trunk,sometimes healed over from an earlier strike.They are tempting because their usally the tallest straightest trees.They tend to delaminate around the growth rings and have insect and rot damage.some here will say they mill them and their fine but usally their heartbreakers and not worth the effort. Frank C.
A man armed with common sense is packing a big piece

Magicman

Old healed over lightning strikes may cause problems such as Frank C. described above plus excessive amounts of pitch buildup.  Fresh lightning strikes that actually kill a tree usually cause no harm to the lumber.


 
Here is one that yielded 2781 bf of nice framing lumber.
Knothole Sawmill, LLC     '98 Wood-Mizer LT40SuperHydraulic   WM Million BF Club Member   WM Pro Sawyer Network

It's Weird being the Same Age as Old People

Never allow your "need" to make money to exceed your "desire" to provide quality service.....The Magicman

ely

i have found that what MM is saying to be true, the way i tell folks to check for me is i have them stab the end of a fresh bucked log with a pocket knife, if it goes in over a half inch each time the logs are not worth me going after. i have found no problems with sawing lighting struck trees, as they say its a crap shoot. i have seen others with bad ones but i remain lucky so far.

MotorSeven

Just remember, depending on what stage the beetles are in determines when the little cute baby beetles bore their way back out of your milled lumber. And yes, they do and yes you can actually hear them gnawing away before you see little tiny piles of sawdust. The holes they leave are small, about the size of the end of an ink pen and once they are gone you don't have to worry about them coming back.
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WDH

The ones that kill the tree and the ones that you hear gnawing away are actually two different types of beetles.  The killers are the bark beetles like mountain pine beetle, southern pine beetle, and Ips.  There are a few more.  After the pine beetles mine the bark and begin to kill the tree, the tree is attacked by ambrosia beetles.  These are the rascals that you can hear chomping away.  After you saw the lumber, the ambrosia beetles cannot survive in the drying lumber.  The ambrosia beetle is also the carrier for the blue stain fungus that turns the wood blue right after the tree dies.

Obviously, the best time to cut the tree is when the bark shows the pitch tubes from the bark beetle attack and the needles show the first sign of yellowing before they turn brown.  In Georgia, it does not take long at all, and the wood quality can go south in a hurry.   
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

slider

sorry bandmiller2,but i must concur with mm and pineywoods.some lightning struct syp may have issues but if it is free then by all means get what you can out of it.like wdh said scaring over produces tight pitch in places but that is really hart pine.i have found that old slow tight ringed trees can stand for quiet a while before the decay gets bad.i use a straight claw hammer to check them with. if it is a large tree you can  sometimes salvage quiet a bit of good wood.for paneling or siding you have more leeway . 
al glenn

MotorSeven

WDH, I can say they live longer than you think. It took me a year and a half to build a 1600 sq ft log house out of beetle killed SYP pine. Started it in the summer, moved into the unfinished interior around Feb /March. Sometime after that I thought i was loosing my mind,,,hearing something. After about a week I figured it out, and by putting an ear to the log wall I could zone  in on them. Soon, little piles of sawdust appeared on the baseboards with a trail leading up to the exit hole. I never saw the beetle exit, so I have no idea what they looked like, but the hole was tiny. After a month or so, they all exited never to return.

The SYP logs I bought were all cut by the miller who had permission from a big lumber company in E. TX to take any beetle killed pine on their zillion acre tree farms. He and his sons built many log houses with these trees. His circle mill was all hand built and all hydraulic..the guy was simply amazing. Come to think of it, he is probably the reason I own a mill today....almost 30 years later smiley_hellow_im_here.
WoodMizer LT15 27' bed

WDH

Wow, that is bad news.  That had to make you lay awake and not sleep at night.
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

MotorSeven

Quote from: WDH on February 14, 2012, 09:34:34 PM
Wow, that is bad news.  That had to make you lay awake and not sleep at night.

:D I did sleep great once I figured out I was not crazy....well not completely crazy.
WoodMizer LT15 27' bed

WDH

That would have driven me crazy  :).
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

wannasaw

I've had other local folklore before this WDH so I'm gettin the hang of it :-\. MM thanks for the info..have you thought of making a series of tuturiols on sawing deadwood(lost trees) if you do I'd subscribe; it's part of my business too that I wish I knew alot more about. Motor we'll get there if we hang around these guys and our saws long enough.
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hunterbuild

The turpentine beetle is the one that eats deep in to the wood leaving a small round hole. Even in cut rounds you can here them at night. I had put a half log in my bedroom ceiling. Sometime later the larvae became beetles. They are quite large with big antennas. The cat would find one or two every day for a couple of weeks. Harmless but scary looking.

WDH

Unfortunately, a whole host of bugs love pine.  They don't like the pitch soaked heartwood so much, so that is good for the bigger, older trees.  The heartwood will hold up a good long time.  A 25 year old tree without heartwood is toast in short order around here, but the big old patriarchs hold up much better.
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xlogger

I've got a syp in my yard that shows pitch holes in it now for months. I've been waiting for it to die but so far it has show no signs. It looks just like pine beetles but not sure. Will not have to carry it far, only about 100 ft from my mill :D.
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