Protect logs from splitting
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Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Wood and Wood Preparation / Protect logs from splitting
Hello,
I’m new around here, but I do follow Paul’s blog for several months.
I live in Belgium for a number of years (being of Romanian origin).
Wood in Belgium is quite expensive but you can find sometimes reclaimed lumber. For example I bought for 40Euros an old oak beam which has enough wood to make a coffee table. However, I need to be resawing that beam into boards so then I decided I need a bandsaw. And as I’m always on the cheapo side, I decided to build my own bandsaw following the plans from this site: woodgears.ca. It will probably take me 6+ months to build that.
Now, coming back to the original question: having these grand plans of milling lumber with my still to be built bandsaw, I collected the other day a log of a plane tree that fell from a storm. It is 30-40cm in diameter, 1.5 m long.
I want to make sure that it won’t split from drying before I manage to cut it into boards with my bandsaw.
What should I do to it? Should I remove the bark?
Should I cut one or two longitudinal incision with a circular saw that I have (could go to 5.5 cm deep)? Any other idea?
thanks,
nicolae
For now I would coat both open ends with melted wax (the best) or a latex (waterbase) paint. This will slow the drying out of the ends of the log and reduce the possibility of “checking”.