Brian,

I know this is not a solution but your log brings me back to high school (Holderness School NH 1975) where I participated in a project where we spent a year building a post and beam cabin using techniques from the 1800's and learning from old time crafts men. We cleared a site in the woods, cut and hauled 50-100 oak logs using oxen in the fall and spent 2 months in the early spring turning them into lumber.

I learned to use a broad ax to make 8x8 and 6x6 beams out of oak logs. I was taught by a 60 year old who could make a 20ft beam in less than an hour using a snap line, saw (to score the log) and a very sharp broad ax. He had been doing it since he was 10 and never wasted a stroke of his ax. He also had a nasty scar on his ankle from one “learning” experience. It would take me the better part of a day to cut a beam this way and my first one had so much twist in it that it was almost unusable.

Another thing that we did was to use a pit saw to saw boards from a log. The pit saw was 8-10ft long two handled saw that could rip a log. Originally they would dig a pit, slide the log part way over it, the master would get on top, and the junior guy would get down in the pit and you sawed away. Ours was a platform that we rolled the logs up onto with the help of our oxen (Buck & Joe)

Let me tell you I did this for 2 weeks, two hours a day and it is as tough a workout as you can imagine. The guy on the bottom gets sawdust stuck to every part of his sweaty body. Once you learned to control the saw we could saw some pretty good 1 X 10 to 1x6 planks.

I also spend a lot of time with a mallet and Froe (sp) splitting oak shingles to roof the cabin. You can develop Popeye like forearms swinging a mallet all day long.

The most important thing I learned from these old timers was to take the time to sharpen your tools (a dull tool is dangerous). These guys spent a lot of time sharpening tools and the magic that they could do with a sharp tool never left me.