[Strawbale] Oak debarking

[Speireag Alden]

Sgrìobh Barbara Roemer & Glenn Miller:

>We debark immediately - whenever everything is still juicy, using a draw
>knife with the logs stacked to a comfortable height.  Sometimes a few days
>in hot dry weather is too much, but if spring is cool and damp, we may have
>ten days or two weeks.  We usually fell and draw in spring, just when the
>sap is running high, and the pieces of back strip off easily in great
>sopping sections, whether pine, oak, or fir.  If we have to let logs lie
>about, they sit through a winter til the bark separates and begins to fall
>off, but we pay the price in bark beetle damage and blue stain.

     In my limited experience with red oak, this results in bark which 
is permanently adhered to the log.  White pine is a different animal; 
the bark will fall right off with time, though at the cost of borers 
and stain, as you note.

>If you have a spud, you can peel it
>more forcefully now - I don't know what a debarker is, but maybe that's what
>you have.

     It should arrive in the mail shortly.  It's a 3.5-inch planer 
which fits on the end of a chainsaw.  You can use it to de-bark, 
carve notches, and essentially do anything else which a portable 
rotary cutter would do.

>Leaving the slash on does mean they transpire
>faster, but you may see more openness at the knots then....

     I'm not worried about open knots or checking; I'm going to use 
them entire, in the round, as posts.  They're big; structural 
strength is not going to be an issue.

Sgrìobh Rob Tom:

>I'm with Babs on this one. Juicy = loosey.

     I guess I'll get to debarking, then.

>Except I don't think that I'd care to use a drawknife.
>
>I don't have a barking spud but I do have a slick (a tool (which one wag 
>called a "spear") from my timber-framing days) and it along with a framing 
>hatchet (another timber-framer's tool) made de-barking red oak logs a
>breeze.

     I don't have a slick (they're very expensive hereabouts) but I 
have a pretty large chisel which approximates one.  I also have a 
draw knife hanging around from the last de-barking effort.  We'll see 
how things work out.

>And I don't think that I'd stop at just the bark, with red oak logs. I'd 
>keep going till all of the sapwood is removed, both for bug/rot-resistance 
>sake and for appearance.

     These will be posts exposed within the structure, visually 
inspectable at all times.  I'm not worried about rot.

     Red oak heartwood is beautiful, no question, but exposing it 
would require actual sawing, and I'm going to use them in the round.

>Actually, I'm not even sure that I'd care to use red oak for an exterior 
>application since it doesn't do all that well in such. White oak, "yes".
>(White pine or cedar would probably be a better choice. Save the red oak
>for an interior application.)

     Yeah.  If I had any of those, I'd use them.  But the only pine of 
decent size on my property is inaccessible, there's no cedar, and no 
white oak.  The red oak, on the other hand, was close enough to fall 
on the house in hurricane, so I took it down for use in the structure.

-Speireag.

-- 
Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the 
injury that provokes it.
--Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher (BCE 3-65 CE)