Mar 6 Of Butts and Sawing

How do I know a good butt? Because I’ve seen enough bad ones.

When I find the right ash butt I can see the hurleys in it—I can count them. All I have to do is carve them out.

It all starts with selecting a butt. For me, the best ash trees are between 12-16 inches at girth (4ft). 

Primo is 14-15”, but I’ll take them up to 18” or as little as 10”. That being said, the wood inside an older ash will not be as supple and the flair of the grain can be too long in its apex, while diameters less than 11” can be depressing to saw as it yields poorly.

I look at the tines to see how they line up, the best being oriented like a clock at 3-6-9-and 12. If the tines are level in the ground they are prized, but if the ground falls away down the hill and the tines are offset by more than a foot then cutting the butt may be a waste of time. I read the bark to see if it is straight as twisting bark means twisting grain. Read the bark and you will read the grain. Many times an ash grows with a sister, but in most of these cases the sister has died off. Where the sister lay the wood is fragile and the grain burled. There are no good hurleys here and this region can quickly dull a saw blade. Before I cut I look for folds that may trap dirt, and I look for rocks around the base that may need to be cleared away with a mattock.

Some geographic regions are good for ash and some are not. Sometimes the ash runs brown. And some times there are mineral deposits that splotch the wood. The ugliest ash I ever cut came out of a patch of woods that used to be an auto dump some forty years before. I’ve cut black, white, green, brown (basket ash), and pumpkin ash, and what I would call balsa ash if there were such a thing--that wasn’t a good batch of hurleys!

I fell the tree first at girth and then work on cutting out the tines. I’ve seen plenty of people on youtube felling the tree all the way at the tines, but I’ve always thought that was a bit dangerous. Still, I don’t know any different than the way I do it. I have dropped hundreds of trees but I don’t enjoy it. To an outsider whose experience comes from watching a logger show on television it may seem like a grand job. But I have seen enough people almost killed and heard a hundred stories in which someone did die. It’s nothing to play around with.

If I can mark the tree and let a timber cutter who drops a hundred trees a day do it then why should I mess with it? Ash are tough as you know. They don’t always cut cleanly and are prone to splitting or, due to the fact that their branches fork, hanging up on other trees. I’d rather transfer the onus of the dropping of the tree to the cutter because if I hang up a tree or slow down the operation then the crew will be less likely to want to work with me.  

Once the tree is prepped I put my saw tip down in it at an angle so that the saw handle is kept at my shins and start working it around the butt. I imagine a point in the center that I’m trying to hit as I work the saw. If I do it well, I can break the butt out by blowing on it. Sometimes I rock it with my hands. If it is too lose I will make another circle looking for my weak spot. When I used to work in the woods myself I’d pull a stubborn butt out with the truck or a come-along. But now I only work with loggers who use dozers and skidders to pull out the butt. 

There is nothing I love more than taking a log and sawing it into planks. When you are good at a skill, really good at it, the act of performing that skill can be a moment of clarity, the closest thing I know to religion. So much brought you to that skill and so much depends on it.

I used to handle all the logs with a cant hook and roll them onto the mill. Since I broke my neck I use the skid steer. Once on the mill I line up the tines, wedge up the top of the butt to send the blade through the heart. I always saw from the small end towards the tines as sawing through the root can send a blade off course. I quarter the logs on the bandmill as best I can and place the quarters aside till I’m ready to set up for planking. To plank I make quick studies of the bark and the grain to decide how to get the best yield. Some planks will be graded senior and others youth. I can flip a quarter several time to get it right. If the tines dissolve, or if the tine is now most prominent at a 45 degree angle, I will rewedge the piece, turning it on its side to perform a type of sawing called rift sawing. Rift sawing is tedious and one of the skills of which I am most proud. I know my machine, I know the stock, and the process creates higher quality blanks. In rift sawing the rings are perpendicular to the cut which will make for the finest hurleys.

When the log is 18” or bigger, I can’t quarter the butt with my mill as the tine end will be bigger than 24” When this happens I have to rive the log. I cut a plane through the heart of the log with my chainsaw and then drive wedges into the end. As the wedges drive in I leapfrog the riving blocks and make my way down the log tapping in more as I go. This is how pole spitting was done. This is hurley splitting.

On a mid- summer’s day ten years back, I was standing on top of a huge ash butt that was too big and ugly to make good hurleys—but I was out of ash. This was a big sucker. The biggest I ever did or ever faced. This was my champion. The sun was high and it was hot and humid as all get out—I had my shirt off and was wearing a cowboy hat. I stood atop that butt driving in wedges. I was an hour into the bastard and it showed no sign of giving up. I’m working away and I hear a clipity-clop, clipity-clop and just then I look up and see a black bearded Amish in black suit clothes driving his black horse and black buggy and just behind him he has a trailered ruby red portable sawmill—yes, pulling a sawmill behind a buggy. I tipped my hat to him. He tipped his to me. Here I was the modern guy doing it the old-timey way while the old-timey guy was doing it the modern way.