Just my personal opinion but eliminating the pith is going to be your most stable solution unless the customer is well informed that the timber will be heavily split and or twisted badly (heavy emphasis on AND because both will be the outcome if the pith is in the blank or even worse centered).

You realize that just air drying that timber to get it to a point where it is anywhere close to being able to go into a kiln is an extremely long process (several months at best) and kiln drying (unless you have access to a vacuum kiln) is an equally long process.

A lot will depend on what the customer is expecting out of the piece. If its suppose to be relatively clean and free of checking/cracking/twisting they may be in for a surprise. If they are totally ok with heavy splitting/checking over time you could likely skip the KD all together.

Big, clean, pretty, KD timbers are outrageously expensive for a reason. The time and care in drying is massive.

Yea, unfortunately i have no experience with this other than with pine and hemlock which I have cut many timbers with a centered pith and they remained dead straight a year later. I talked to the owner of the sawmill and kiln that I will be taking it to, a well known “old timer” in the area and he actually told me to center the pith on the 6x10. I guess i’m going to try that as well as one with no pith in it at all and will find out in 45 days!

Please do the forum a favor and post photos of the cants sawn prior to the kiln and then after. It would be very interesting to see. Good luck.

Yea, unfortunately i have no experience with this other than with pine and hemlock which I have cut many timbers with a centered pith and they remained dead straight a year later. I talked to the owner of the sawmill and kiln that I will be taking it to, a well known “old timer” in the area and he actually told me to center the pith on the 6x10. I guess i’m going to try that as well as one with no pith in it at all and will find out in 45 days!

First off, who has a kiln that you can do a 10x6 in what is basically a juvenile tree? It will need to be air dried for a couple years before going into a conventional kiln. The only way to kiln dry that with no degrade is a vacuum kiln. You are going to have sapwood on the corners and that will absolutely crack if the log was cut recently. Sap has been flowing for a while and that sapwood will be basically saturated. It'll definitely going to crack the pith if you use something besides a vacuum kiln and likely twist pretty severely. Same happens if you try to get the pith near the edge, but no idea how you get a 10" board out of a 13" log with having the pith in the middle. You need to buy a bigger log and tell the customer to put something up temporarily for a couple years if you can't find a vacuum kiln operator.

I sometimes wonder if people responding to posts are basing their opinions on “what someone told them” vs. having operated a sawmill, operated a kiln, or operated a planing mill themselves, and cut down the trees, bucked the logs, and sawed the logs themselves. It also amazes me that I have an 80 year old guy running this sawmill and kiln telling me exactly how to cut the mantle, a guy that’s been doing this type of work for longer than anyone on here has been alive, but yet they still want to argue with what is being said. I don’t know the exact dimension of the small end of the log(was guessing 13 to 14”) but I was able to get a 6x10 solid pc. out of it.(picture attached) It is now in the kiln. I will post a pic of it when it is down to 6 to 8% moisture content.

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more pics….

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Nice cant.

I owned a portable band mill and had a small kiln for approximately 20 years. 115 acres of property and sawing for others. Everything from felling to skidding in with 4wd tractor/loader, sawing, stickering, drying, and building custom cabinetry, moulding packages, etc.. Prior to that experience around large circle mills both single and twin blade sawing a lot of large/wide pine and so on.

What Rich is saying is relatively true. Your guy may be talking air drying for a short time to lose some surface moisture then into the kiln til the outer shell measures 6-8% but to take a 6" thick cant to 6-8% through the entire cant is a pretty lengthy process with an conventional kiln. The vacuum kilns are another story and I have no experience with them other than what Ive read and seen on YouTube but the speed and degrade is greatly reduced and thicker material is more manageable.

As you likely already know, that check in the end will likely wind up being a big check along with others. No biggie if the customer is fine with it. Its a mantle after all. Your only issue if its not completely dry is future movement and some would say bugs but Walnut is a lesser bug prone wood anyway.

Heck, timberframes are fab'd and put up basically green for ages. Lots of shrinkage, homeowners live in a house that sounds like cannon fire as they dry out, but it works.

Good luck, looks good from here, keep us posted.

PS, If you havent tried them, take a look at the Ripper blades from Jerry's re-sharp (no affiliation) I had started using them just before selling my mill and they were pretty impressive. Only gripe was I liked 1" pitch and at that time they were only available in 7/8" pitch but they were very nice blades. English steel I believe. Cost effective. I still run them for resawing here at the shop on 36" 9hp vertical band saw.

Here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNPXnpMKPjk

Lumberjacktim,
I'm confused between post #1 and post #7. The responses you got were what "normally" happens in the law of averages of probably 85% of the time IN hardwoods. Pine and hemlock are of the softwood family and from my studies and correspondings those are more favorable in "average" timberframing and log homes due to their lightness in wieght (compared to hardwoods) and stabilities during drying BUT for the record the log home and some timberframe places claim a kiln dried log which is a true/false loaded statement. YES they are put in a kiln and the outside is brought down to "XYZ" specs and sterilized (debugged) BUT center IS NOT MC% correct due to the time and costs (from my understandings to kiln schedule proper, thorough, true complete drying in timbers that size without vacuum requires MONTHS).

One mentioned juvenile aged wood and he is correct. It may be a marketable size tree BUT has greater drying stresses than older larger trees.

I have also logged, sawn, kiln dried and also AD'd. I've studied reactions and expectations of our common hardwoods. Even done some comparisons of who, what and why between our todays wood reactions to our past (100+ year old growth).

I'm NOT telling you this 80 yr old sawyer doesn't know a unknown to most valuable knowledge BUT am saying the law of average with pith in is NOT in your favor. I have several AD'd 4-6" pith in "mantles" that mother nature checked heavily or split. THAT doesn't bother me as I know the chances of it happening in the drying process.

Transporting your mantle.....wrap it in a kraft (brown) paper. This will allow some moisture change (IF any) BUT at a slower rate to allow wood slow rebalance (fast changes do most warps and twists once it has/had been stabilized in a kiln/AD'd) and also leave it a week or 2 wrapped in the new home so it can re-adjust slowly to the new enviroment. True Big timber mantles are beautiful BUT most DO NOT understand the risks in/of drying.

Please do not be upset with the others posts as you asked for advise and theirs is correct by the law of averages. I do wish you the best with this project and keep us posted. do me a favor, once the mantle is out (which should be too long in length, when you cut it off take a meter and check center of log/timber and outside of both ends for my studies/comparisons.

Thanks,
Tim

For your information, I owned a Baker/Enercraft manual sawmill and have been harvesting turning blanks from logs for 30 years.

And I'm 70 years old.

you gotta respect them old timers!

Rich,

Is there a market for selling turning blanks? I seem to have quite a few laying around from my logging operations.

Tim

Woodturners are extremely frugal! A lot of them have an arborist or two that supplies them just to get rid of timber. There is a market for the rare and unusual. Box Elder with lots of red sells really well, burls of course, and really just any highly figured wood. But just common hardwoods are a difficult sell.

Rich,

Is there a market for selling turning blanks? I seem to have quite a few laying around from my logging operations.

Tim

strange how this site keeps reposting my posts…..anyway, some cool wood discovered recently…..first pic is actually white oak(after standing dead for 10 years), 2nd is poplar(the infamous rainbow poplar), and the third white pine.

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Its fun to watch the wild colors as poplar oxidizes as it hits the air.

Tim, I have found a little niche market, but am reluctant to go into details as it is incredibly competitive. It's certainly not high profit, and shipping costs are incredibly expensive. I am going to a regional woodturning symposium next week with a van load of blanks. It was a great event in 2019. Lots of people told me my prices were too low, but my main goal was to reduce inventory. At 70 now, my wife and kids (45, 41 year old kids) are getting that look in their eyes when they see my inventory. Our son comments that, "if that place ever burns, they will see it from space". So at this stage of life, any profit is better than an estate sale price. Use the link to find turning clubs near your location.

https://woodturner.org