Hidden Objects
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Will hidden objects inside your trees destroy your sawmill blades?
Your bandsaw blades could be in jeopardy from secrets lurking in your timber for decades
When sawing logs on your Woodland Mills Portable Sawmill, the usual idea is to seamlessly slice your logs into beautiful strips of lumber to use in your next exciting project.
But sometimes objects covertly creeping inside your wood have a different intent.
This happened to Ross, of the YouTube channel Digitalsawyer, not once but twice in two weeks, consecutively destroying two brand new blades on his HM130MAX in the process.
“I didn’t know that there was any metal in the log,” says Ross, chatting with Woodland Mills about his experience. “Both logs were given to me by a local tree service, so I don’t know where they came from.”
While finding foreign objects embedded in your wood tends to be uncommon, it can have devastating effects when it happens.
In his video titled “Saw Blade Ruination!” Ross shows the tiny metal wires inside the first log he cut. Then he shows his sawmill blade, and how the sharp tips on the teeth have been stripped after cutting through the metal.
Ross says “given the layout of the wire and its size I do believe it was a fence (inside the tree) that caused the problem.”
Trees are wonderfully resilient, able to shape themselves around many obstacles to continue growing. Sometimes though trees can fully grow around said objects, and it can be nearly impossible to tell from the outside until you start sawing, especially if you get your lumber from somewhere else and didn’t cut it yourself.
In another video posted shortly afterward, Ross talks about the brand-new blade installed on his HM130MAX, and it too was depressingly not long for this world. Immediately after Ross is heard talking about how that new blade is toast after striking a nail embedded in the tree.
“Are y’all even believing this?” said Ross in the video, pointing the camera at the “$27 nail” that destroyed yet another sawmill blade.
While metal fenceposts or nails are unfortunate things to find while milling, sometimes the objects embedded in trees can be truly strange. Ross says the weirdest thing he found in a tree was a glass marble, which thankfully only glanced his blade.
But the oddity doesn’t stop there. Frank, another member of the Woodland Mills community, shared his experience finding his own bizarre object in a tree hollow while he was milling: a shower head. Now how did that get in there?
Theorycrafters in the Woodland Mills Product Owners and Community Facebook page suggested the tree had been used as an outdoor shower at one point and the tree grew around it, but we’ll never know for sure.
In another thread, members of the community shared finding everything from barbed wire to bullets, as well as horseshoes and other hardware.
There are ways to clue in to whether your wood is housing any foreign objects. A visual inspection of the logs before you mill could reveal nails, screws or other things hidden inside. Debarking your logs could also help to reveal items hiding just beneath the surface.
Some sawyers even use metal detectors to ensure there's nothing inside their wood before they start cutting.
On his end, Ross says when he’s milling he keeps an eye out for “obvious bluing that can indicate a potential metal object somewhere close to where I’m cutting.”
Ross adds he hopes his advice helps others, who can manage to avoid any harm to their blades which was inflicted to his own.
But if you have found any curious items inside your trees, let us know! Share your photos and stories in the Woodland Mills Facebook community page and see what other outlandish obstacles people have found inside their wood.