Tour of Frank Miller Lumber Mill

In a departure from my current efforts on the nesting tables, I took a break to go up to Union, Indiana and tour the Frank Miller Lumber Company. The trip was organized by my new friend Jennifer whom I met at www.woodcentral.com. If you are not tuned in to the scene at Wood Central, you are missing out on a great resource. So go there and start reading the bulletin boards and the articles. You'll learn a lot.

The tour was a lot of fun for us engineery types. I always like to go into someone else's plant and see what they do. The saw mill is all about quarter sawn white oak. Over 80% of what they produce is quarter sawn white oak. They have a little red oak and a little mahogany and not much else. Their primary customer, it turns out, is the Stickley Company, so most of this pretty quarter sawn white oak with all its ray flecks is turning in to that fine Arts & Crafts furniture that you see at the most expensive furniture stores.



The band saw that is their primary saw is awsome. It is highly automated and analyzes each log to get the most lumber out of it. They also recover and use essentially all of the byproducts. Did I mention it's highly automated? They sell the bark for mulch, they burn the sawdust to make steam for their kilns, they ship chips to a papermill. There's just not much that goes to waste.

The one thing that impressed me most was that all sharpening of the big bandsaw blades is by hand. They have a team of very specialized craftsmen that do nothing but sharpen the band saws.

Hand Planes for Jointing and Smoothing Table Tops - Nested Tables 8

This Lee Valley Bevel Up Smooth Plane is just what the Dr. ordered for smoothing table tops. This Mahogany that I'm working with has multiple reversing grain and is very subject to tear out. This required putting a steeply pitched micro-bevel on my blade, so that the pitch is about 60°. The bevel-up system allows you to modify the angle of the cutter very easily. That's why I love this plane. I can use it with a very low angle blade and turn it on it's side for shooting end grain or put in a high angle blade for smoothing gnarly grain. In the past, I've kept an assortment of antique Stanley hand planes for this type of work. They still have uses, but a modern, redesigned hand plane has captured a place in my workshop.


You can see below that the excellent adjustment features of the plain allow for some pretty precise plaining. I'm getting a legitimate 1.5 thousandth inch shaving. There is excellent depth adjustment, lateral adjustment and throat opening adjustment. This is just a great plane! I'm thinking of selling a few of my Stanley hand planes and some of my woodies as well.


Finishing up with a Stanley #81 scraper. There was still some final smoothing required, so I turned to this scraper. I've had this thing in my basement for a decade and never used it. The blade is a modern scraper that I got from Rockler. I had to draw a burr on the end, which I don't normally do, since the normal mode d'employ is to use the broad edge. This only took a few moments.


As you can see, it produced some nice fluffy shavings. I attempted to measure their thickness also, but they were too fragile. The final results was a nicely smoothed table top.

This mahogany that I'm working with looks smooth and simple at first glance, but when I started working with it, I realized it has some incredible complexity, on a small scale, throughout the entire piece. I wetted the piece down with mineral spirits and it looks like there's going to be some real three dimensional chatoyance in there. It almost looks holographic. I'm hoping....