 Should I put a quarter in? Wood has gotten quite expensive lately, which always seems kind of weird to me because I'm pretty sure this stuff grows on trees. But to get a finished piece of wood, like your standard two by four from a tree, takes a lot of steps. And when there's a disruption to that complex distribution system, costs can suddenly skyrocket when supply can no longer meet demand. What if you cut up the middleman and went straight from tree to mill lumber doing every step yourself using your own hand tools? Well, let's give that a shot and see how much it would cost to produce our own simple two by four by doing every step ourselves. The process of going from a tree to pre-cut dimensional lumber can be a bit of a procedure that we're very detached from today. For many, a finished two by four feels almost completely foreign from the tree it originally came from. And it's just this default modern building block for use for anything from building houses to furniture. But nevertheless, at its origin, a modern two by four starts its life as a tree. Usually a softwood tree, such as a spruce, pine, or fir. In the US, most of the softwood lumber comes from the West Coast and are often harvested from second growth forests which were planted 50 to 60 years ago. Once an area is ready to be harvested, the desired trees are marked and then cut down and delimbed. From there, they are transported to the sawmill. First, I ran through a deep barker to remove the outer bark. Then begins the milling process of slicing the logs to the desired sizes. Previously, we got to film a mobile sawmill to help cut some hardwood. It shows the general method of cutting a log into dimensional lumber. The next step is the drying or seasoning of the wood, which removes all the moisture and the freshly cut wood. In the drying process, the wood will shrink from what it was cut to. Lastly, after drying, the wood is passed through planers, which gives the lumber a smooth finish with round corners. It's these last two steps that cause a two by four to not actually be two inches by four inches as a finished product. The shrinkage during drying and the extra milling removes about a half an inch from each dimension, leaving the modern two by four is actually one and a half inches by three and a half. From here, the lumber is graded by quality and shipped out to your local lumber yard. For my two by four, I tried to find a more local source of a tree in the Minnesota area. And after a lot of emails and exchanges with several forestry organizations and companies, I only ran into a dead end on finding a good source. I ideally wanted to gain access to a tree and a forest and figure out how much a single tree would cost to buy the rights to. But a variety of issues caused that to be pretty much impossible to figure out. So after a fair amount of searching over the past summer, I found the answer to my problems is to look within my own yard. So when I first bought this property two years ago, this tree was not looking the greatest, was still alive, and I was hoping it might come back. I noticed at the end of this year that it has pretty much completely died. There are no leaves on here. And it's very convenient because it's basically that species and size I was looking for. Got a few obstacles to cut it, but power lines, power lines on both sides, conveniently the direction it leans. The process is gonna be to cut it in segments and try and pull it away from everything. I believe that these are basically little kid shin guards for soccer that are zip tied to the metal, but I think for our needs it'll work. So this should basically just has two spikes and let me just dig in and climb up as I go. Probably get up to a certain height and remember that I have a fear of heights and we'll see what happens at that point. So I've gotten a lot of the tree limbs removed and cleared. Now a little bit of deliberation. I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I think it's a lot harder as it gets higher up. A lot more obstacles and a lot less confidence as the whole thing starts to wiggle. After getting a closer look at the challenges involved in actually cutting my tree and not getting electrocuted, I opted to not risk my life and bring in a professional to take care of it. Big thanks to Peach Tree Care, a local Twin Cities based tree removal service who are pros at handling any tree from massive to small. Check them out if you need a tree removed or trimmed in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area. How long have you been doing this for? I've been doing tree work for about 10 years. Kind of what we did was kind of orthodox, but effective. It was a tight situation with the power line and stuff like that. So it's got a rope in the top. We knew it was dead and really light so we shouldn't do anything. Really crazy, but stuff we've been doing a long time so we kind of know what we can and cannot do. We work in the Twin Cities and around usually. If anybody needs any tree work out here, give us a call. So one issue we really have to deal with historically is high power lines, potentially getting in the way of your tree felling. So I had some professionals come and take just a little bit off the top so we don't have to worry about that and left the rest of the tree here for my own cutting. And for this we have the Viking axe that was forged of the axes we made. I don't think we've really tested this on a full tree and this will be the biggest tree we actually try and cut. Before this we've done stone, native copper and bronze and they've each yielded a better performance of each one and I expect this one to probably very easily be the best. This is a good over a foot thick so it's gonna take a little bit I think. Historically when it comes to turning a tree into usable lumber, there are few techniques we've explored in our past projects. Perhaps the simplest is riving where you split a log along the grains of the wood. This works fairly well for straight timber without many knots but doesn't produce perfectly square and straight lumber. The other option is hewing where you effectively chop a log into desired dimensions with an axe. This was the standard method for producing lumber for most of history until the industrial sawmill came in and supplanted it. But before the sawmill there was also the option of sewing it by hand which to best get something comparable to a modern two by four is a process we'll be doing. The historical way to mill log into lumber is either using a pit or a pair of giant saw horses which allows a two person crew to run the saw from above and below slowly working your way down the length of the log. So we have our log put up on these nice saw horses giant saw horses that Lauren put together to prevent us from having to dig a huge pit which is the other method. This is the saw blade that we forge. This is supposed to be for the sawmill but first we're gonna use it for our actual hand milling. But it's a little short for this. It should work, but just in case I made a much bigger one it's a little bit more appropriate for a two person team. So that should hopefully speed things up. Basically exact same process to build it just a lot longer. Made the teeth a little bit finer. So first step we'll put a chalk line get a straight line that will cut along and they'll be eventually the bottom and we'll square everything off of that. So we brace things, head it off at the end add some little platforms here just to be a little bit more sturdy. The touch wobbly which isn't great when we're sawing on it but I feel a lot better now. A little bit more. This was also left in the rain so it's nice and wet probably even harder to saw. Actually seem to be having better luck with the smaller saw I think just because we had larger teeth they really get a little bit more curfewing which creates a bigger channel so the saw blade doesn't bind. That's the main challenge with the other one. A lot easier to use but hopefully we get further enough in we can add a wedge to split it out and kind of resolve that issue for the most part but this is pretty slow going so far and this is the end that has rotten so it might get even harder as we go. Things are now going as smoothly as hoped. Seems the main issue with the big one at least is kind of the curfewing so it keeps binding and it makes it really hard to like get a good full stroke. It is incredibly exhausting and I don't know how much further we can go beyond this few inches which is very unpromising rather than trying to power through it it's better to kind of rethink, re-examine make sure we get all of these teeth of the saws and everything set up in the most efficient way possible before we burn ourselves out. But first quick word from today's sponsor Keeps. Two out of three guys will experience male pattern baldness by the time they're 35. If that's something you're concerned about then you might be interested in today's sponsor. Keeps offers the only two FDA approved hair loss treatments out there and it has more five star reviews than any of its competitors. Getting and using it is really simple. Consult with a medical professional online and get delivered straight to your home. Best way to prevent baldness is to combat it while you still have hair. If you're ready to take action and prevent hair loss go to keeps.com slash htme or click the link in the description and receive 50% off your first order. That's k-e-e-p-s dot com slash htme. Alright so we're back at it for day two of the milling and hopefully this time a little bit better success. So I went through and made a few improvements to the saw blade here. Basically doubled the size of the teeth, cut out every other one and then was able to add some better curfewing to it to allow us to a little bit wider cut for the blade. So hopefully some find. And then as backup got another saw here some pretty large teeth. So I also did thin down the blade and the unfortunate thing of that is when the frame falls out of the frame you got pressure on it, it's gonna bend it back up. So as we were doing it I think it got a little loose. The bottom pin came out and then it got squished. So just straighten that out, get back in the frame get things tightened up again. Should be good as new. A little crooked, a little trouble keeping it straight or making pretty good progress. When you're in the bottom you definitely get a lot of sawdust in your face, your eyes and in your mouth. So that's fun. But yeah, a little bit of curve to correct for but so far we're about to put in. So I think we're about ready to move the saw horse out and just soften the middle and get the rest of it. All right, so it took about three hours. So we got our first cut. It's really straight. Honestly better than I expected. Yeah, when sawing it it looked super wonky. Yeah, got pretty bad at the end. I think there's a lot of knots. Just overall I can tell there's just a lot of knots in this thing. Just don't look at that. Yeah, yeah, we got to clean up the end a little bit still. Just kind of split at the end. Took three of us about three hours at least to do this first cut. That was with a lot of breaks. I think that was probably the main thing that slowed us down is that it's very exhausting and we had to stop and rest a fair amount of times. So I think if you're in shape and you got the motion down it probably would be a lot quicker. But yeah, so that's three hours for one cut and we got three more. So we're running low on daylight. So I don't know if we're gonna get our board done today. Each successive cut should hopefully be a little bit smaller, a little bit narrower. So hopefully we should speed up after this. Less resistance, hopefully it'll be easier. Show me my snowman. Well, update on him. Oh, that guy, he does not rock in his glasses right now. But he is hitting the dude. Cool as hell. All right, so we got halfway there. We have two sides and I think this cut is a bit straighter. This one went a lot quicker. It was a little bit over an hour. Yeah. The other one took three and it was still very difficult and that was just because we're all really exhausted and you can only go for short bursts. So that's slowed things down a lot. We're at like four hours now I think just to get these two cuts and still got two more to go to finish the two by four. For the last two cuts I opted to switch to indoors and sawing solo with the log clamp vertically. Another method I've seen depicted in some illustrations. To make all the cuts four or two by four and as you can tell, she's a little crooked. Not the straightest cuts. Got a little bit of curve here and there and not even all that square. Sawing by hand leaves a lot of room for random variable-ness and it's something that I think is a big advantage to the sawmill is that it was a consistent mechanical repetitive motion that would produce a consistent result. Whereas this, you know, you get a little tired in one arm or another, you're gonna kind of favor that and suddenly you're off. Even experienced Sawyer who's cutting boards it's not gonna be spot on. It's probably gonna be a little bit wonky but for any like fine woodworking where you actually want it to be perfectly straight and level, you're gonna be finishing it with a draw knife and hand planes to get it perfectly flat. And with that I think I can just do a little bit of handy work with a draw knife and whittle out an actual straighter two by four here. So try not to spend too much time but try and clean it up a little bit and see if you can get a little bit nicer looking two by four out of this. So it did a fair amount of cleaning and draw knifing this guy. I think he's looking a lot better and a lot closer to an actual two by four took out some of the thicker areas so you have to kind of average out some of the curve and this is a much more promising two by four I would say. We have a kind of standard one here for comparison. It's a little bit thick, a little uneven, still a bit rough, passable for two by four. I think I've seen considerably worse boards than this for sale at Home Depot. I'm gonna consider that a pretty good win. This is obviously a pretty learned skill. The better you get at it, the better your results gonna be. But I think for a first attempt, I'm pretty happy with this. But how much did it cost? So the first cut on this took three hours but that was with three people. So that's a total of nine hours of labor and the second cut was a little bit quicker and only took an hour but that was still with three people. So that's three hours of labor. And the third cut slowed down a little bit with that two hours but that was just by myself. So that's only two hours of labor and then the last cut was only one hour. So that puts a total of 15 hours to mill this two by four. If you were someone who's a little bit more experienced at this, you could probably cut down those hours. I wouldn't be surprised if you could do it in half the time. So today's minimum wage of $13.50 here in Minneapolis, Minnesota that is $229.50 of labor just to produce this. When I was able to squeeze out a few pennies by cutting down the tree I owned that would already need to be filled, it ended up costing $250 to have the tree people come and make sure I didn't electrocute myself to death. That puts us at almost $500 for this two by four. For comparison, during 2021 when timber prices got pretty crazy high, they were up like 500% of the normal value. A two by four which sometimes costs $3 was going for the astronomical price of 15. Mine cost almost 500. The exact price is $479.50 using the minimum wage here right now in Minneapolis. You might be wondering why did I waste a bunch of time making a really expensive piece of wood? And the answer is that's kind of what this channel is about, exploring the things we just kind of take for granted and trying to see just how difficult it would be to actually do it yourself. And the main set of rules is that I can only use things that I have made and effectively unlocked. And a big thing for a lot of future projects is having dimensional lumber and timber to work with rather than having to spend 15 hours on each board. And this also acts as a baseline for one of my large upcoming projects that I've been trying to work on for a while. I'm basically trying to industrialize and produce a water-powered sawmill. So thanks everybody for your continued support. I thought this wouldn't be possible. Consider supporting us on Patreon. We're adding in some more voting abilities where you can kind of help direct what type of things we're making. Thanks for your great support. Thanks for watching. Thanks again to Q's for sponsoring this video. 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