The old birch tree

Several years ago we had our weeping birch taken down. It was infested with something that made the leaves curl up and turn brown. We had it sprayed once, guy with the hazmat suit, warnings to the kids next door to stay out of the front yard for a few hours, the whole nine yards. The next day I saw a yellow warbler sitting in the tree. The guy said the poison dissipates fairly quickly and isn’t a danger to the birds but somehow the image of him in the hazmat suit made me skeptical and we determined that we weren’t going to do that again.


The tree was okay for a while and then whatever insects had infested it the first time came back. It was an old tree, probably planted when the house was new, which was 1954. Trees have a lifespan and we figured this one was getting close to its end so we had an arborist come and take the tree down. At my request he saved a bunch of logs for me, mostly the trunk and bits of the larger limbs. I duly went and bought some sealer and painted the ends with it and stacked them in the garage. I’m calling them logs because I don’t know what else to call them. I always think of logs as really long pieces of tree and these pieces are only about two feet long. I guess we do talk about logs for firewood and they’re short.


The Retired Teachers Art Show is coming up in a couple of weeks, and as usual, I’m doing things at the last minute. I decided it was time to haul some of the logs into the shop and see if I could use them for bandsaw boxes. I’ve worked on three so far and they are pretty badly checked despite the stuff I painted on the ends, a sign I should have done something with them sooner.


I was a bit apprehensive about working with them as a friend to whom I had given some of the birch said she had a lot of trouble trying to cut the pieces on her eighteen inch bandsaw with a powerful motor. Mine is a fourteen inch saw with a smaller motor.


The first thing I had to do was figure out how to get the bark off. I used my belt axe on the first log. That worked pretty well but it really made my hands sore the next day. There were splits between the bark and the wood of the second log and I decided to try an old chisel of my grandfather’s to see if I could get it in the cracks and further separate the bark that way. I have a wooden mallet that Richard turned so I used that to whack away at the bark. It came off more easily than with the axe and it wasn’t as hard on my hands. I did use the axe towards the end of the process to get the last bits of bark off.

Stripping the bark

I have a contraption for the bandsaw that I bought specifically for resawing, i.e. making boards out of logs. It works quite well, although it’s a bit of a pain to get it set up. I’ve been making bandsaw boxes for a long time and I’m pretty comfortable guiding wood through the saw manually. My bandsaw boxes are seldom square so they often involve cutting a slice off a curved form. I decided this time to try to make one side of the log flat enough that I could comfortably hold onto it while I fed it through the saw.


On the first one I used the axe, then a draw knife, then a scrub plane, and then a smoothing plane on that face before taking the log to the saw. On the second one I used the axe, the scrub plane and the smoother. On the one I worked on tonight. I used the axe, put the side I was flattening on the floor to see how much it rocked and then took the axe to it again. I further refined my technique by getting a piece of aluminum angle iron to use as a straight edge against the face. Then I marked the high spots with pencil and used the axe some more. I’ve quit for the night and it’s not completely flat at this point. I’ll have a look at it in the morning to see if it’s flat enough to cut.

Creating a flat side

As I mentioned before there are lots of checks in the wood. I think I may fill some of them with epoxy and leave them as part of the finished box. That isn’t to everyone’s taste but I want to respect some of the tree’s imperfections by leaving them in. I’ll lose a lot of wood if I only use the parts that don’t have splits. I may make some boxes with the cracks filled and some where I use the small amount of wood that isn’t cracked. I don’t think I'll process any more logs at the moment. I need to put a thinner blade on the bandsaw to actually make the boxes and changing blades is a bit of a pain. Besides, I could get carried away milling logs and not get the boxes done in time for the show. I have only two weeks and it’s time to focus. I really hope I can turn some of the logs into pieces I’m proud of. I want the beauty of that old tree to carry on in a different form. Stay tuned.