Log salvage

So a friend and I decided to get a log out of the river today. It's native of some sort possibly Black Maire.
It was a lot harder than we expected but after some digging with the tractor and by hand then lots of jiggling with the chain we got it free.

All up it took four hours.

I also have to fix my bosses tractor next week since we broke the locking pin on the loader.

The plan is once it's dried perhaps in 2022 if the world hasn't ended we will use a chainsaw mill to make it into slabs.

Very nice!

That looks like quite a project.

Eric

I love salvaging logs. I wish i had a boat, it would make it much easier to do so(i once strapped a yellow cedar log to my kayak and paddled it to a beach with better access, boy was that hard work). Right now i mainly am grabbing small diameter logs which i can carry out by hand. Otherwise i cut up big old cedar booms and make them into 10' long fence posts.

Nice find, i imagine if the log sat out of the water in a sunny spot you could be cutting it by next year or even sooner. With it not having any bark on it, it most likely doesn't hold the water to well. A few years back i helped a community member cut up some pine/fir which had been floating in his pond for a few years, we pulled it out and cut it up right there with his bandsaw mill.

Though chainsaw mills do have their place, I found them painfully tiresome.  For a log that big I’d try and find someone with a portable bandsaw mill to cut it. After cutting my first 100 board feet of lumber with a chainsaw mill, I was ready to find a Wood Mizer.  The chainsaw mill I had used about 10x the gas for the same number of boards as my band mill.  Better quality lumber, less planing, and more board feet will be salvaged with a band mill over a chainsaw mill.  If you do end up going diy with the chainsaw, a ripping chain on the absolute biggest saw you have would be good.

That's a beautiful piece of timber in the original post.  Well worth a few hours of sweat.  

I can't see "Log Salvage" as a thread title without thinking of the classic Canadian folk song Snap The Line Tight as performed by James Keelaghan: