I’ve been messing around with reclaimed wood for almost thirty years now. From the very beginning, the first challenge we encountered when trying to mill reclaimed wood was the %&*@?! metal. Yes, pretty much every piece of old wood that I have ever milled had to have some sort of metal fasteners removed from it. There were a lot of hard lessons.
Lessons learned by destroying expensive saw blades, or even more expensive planer knives, or ridiculously expensive moulder knives.
In the beginning, we thought we could see all the metal. Back in the early nineties, we were mostly cutting big Douglas Fir Timber. These had come out of big industrial buildings and, theoretically, should not have had too many fasteners in them. Just some bolts hat the ends where they were joined with other timbers……..
Right. It didn’t matter how carefully we inspected the wood for fasteners, invariably, we would find one with a saw blade once we got it on the mill. It was almost uncanny. Halfway down a 20’ 8x8 that had been a post in a huge warehouse some guy back in the 40’s had climbed up a ladder and hammered in a big ole nail and broken off the head. Why? We’ll never know.
It didn’t take too long to figure out that we had to add metal detectors to our rapidly expanding metal removal toolkit. We got as good as it was possible to get at finding buried metal in old timbers. Which was about 95%. I don’t know how, but there were always a few nails or screws that found there way past the metal pulling crew and were discovered, usually accompanied by cursing, by the sawyer. Any time the mill hit metal it meant that the blade had to be changed, a 10 minute process and another blade to be re-sharpened.
Our metal pulling toolkit evolved from hammers and catspaws to include not only metal detectors but chisels, slide hammers, a whole collection of crowbars, railroad spike pullers, and a number of custom made, fabricated steel devices resembling giant nightmarish dental tools.
We found all sorts of things embedded in the wood we re-milled. We filled 50-gallon drums with nails, screw, spikes, shear rings, steel rods, gussets, and even bullets. I remember one piece, an 8x8 perhaps 10’ long. The crew pulled hundreds of large stables and nails from it. They worked on it for hours and were still getting signals from the metal detector that there was still stuff in there. Eventually we gave up on it.
We decided that it had been situated right next to a work station in the door factory that it was salvaged from and for decades, whoever sat at that workstation operated pneumatic staplers and nailers. Any time they felt like taking out some workplace frustration; they just slammed a few into the post. Decades of this treatment had left this piece of wood unsuitable for re-use.
We tried several times to develop tools to automate, speed up and perfect this process. All were met with mixed results. In the end, we have come to terms with the fact that the best way to get the metal out is by hand. With lots of hard work, diligence and perseverance, we are now able to get about 97% of all the metal out before it gets to our sawmill. The other 3% we find the hard way.
