We have had some beautiful weather lately, and we were able to get over to our neighbors mill to cut up some of our planking stock! Im not sure if I went into much detail about what we are doing on the mill, so i’ll fill ya in. We got a great deal on some awesome fir for planking, but it was all 2” by 10″ . Our planking only needs to be 1-1/2 so it needs to be cut down. It will be cut eventually to 3 ish or 4 ish inches wide and 1-1/2 thick. I could easily cut it down to width, but I don’t have a saw big enough to cut it to thickness. The other option is to just send it all through a thickness planer and be done with it. Not a bad option, but I couldn’t stand to see so much of this beautiful wood turned into saw dust. This is why we have been waiting so long for the mill… By using the mill to rip the lumber we end up with a 1/2″x10″ off cut of gorgeous CVG fir which can later be cut into strips and used for trim! Pretty stoked…

 Our ridiculously cool neighbor Jim and his bad ass saw mill!

 I couldn’t believe what an accurate, clean cut this thing made! If anyone is looking to buy a little mill I definitely recommend Wood Mizer!

 1-1/2 on the money the whole way!

 Could it be… Holy s@#t IT”S PLANKING!

 All this wood actually came from spending hours sorting through construction grade piles at big lumber yards! The majority of it is CVG at least 20 rings per inch! Buehler boats get a lot of flack for speccing construction grade, but what people don’t understand is that  1 no one is forcing you to use construction grade if you don’t want to, and 2 that doesn’t mean you go to your local lumber yard and grab whatever wood is at the top of the pile!!

The majority of the stuff is junk, but if you have more time then money ( like us!) you are willing to spend hours looking like a weirdo sorting through a massive pile of lumber to get to even one good piece. We have some “construction grade” fir that is VG, around 30 rings per inch, and completely clear for at least 14 ft!  No one can call that stuff junk…

On the other hand one of the reasons we spent so much time sorting through construction grade to save money is so we could afford to spend the money where it really counts…on planking… Since we are planning on sailing to the tropics I am only willing to use the highest quality fir we could get for our planking, seeing as we don’t have 5 years to spend slowing sorting and gathering piece by piece from construction piles we had to pay the price!

It shouldn’t be long before we are wrapping planks around the hull!

Thats all for now!