Making steam-bending oak for our kayak cockpit coamings. Normally I just buy this stuff but all of my suppliers were running low so we fired up the chainsaw mill to tackle this log a friend generously donated (thanks again Don!).
Coamings are a challenge because the wood has to be perfectly straight grained and clear at 8 feet long which is surprisingly hard to do. 3 ft, 6 ft fine, but it seems like there’s always some imperfection keeping you from getting that perfect 8 feet. For example this log would have been a windfall except for one wavy spot in the grain which limited our yield to just 10 coamings worth of wood.
The single good thing about doing this with a chainsaw mill is that we can use a circular saw to cut along the grain making what would have been unusable straight boards into usable ones. We cut along the sap line on site, the scribed and cut fair curves back at the shop, then finally carefully cut those curves on a table saw using a thin kerf circular saw blade instead of a full size blade. This takes a bit of experience and judgement to do safely.
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