A Boat in the Woodsvideo
One Last Try at Milling My Own Boat Timbers - No. 37
May 2, 2026 · 25 min · 90K views · Eastern Canada
Man milling timber with chainsaw mill in forest clearing
What this video covers
Joshua, restoring a 1966 Japanese-built 32-foot wooden sailboat off-grid in eastern Canada, spends four days in late April 2026 attempting to fell and mill larch trees on a friend's property to harvest framing timber.▶ 0:55 Clearing an overgrown forest road with an electric chainsaw, he works out a multi-tree felling sequence to drop a clear-grained larch without hanging it up — but the felled tree catches on a dead standing tree and waits for wind to finish the job.▶ 1:52 The milled timber shows the same reddish discoloration that made his previous log unusable, and chainsaw performance is plagued by pitch buildup on the teeth clogging the oiler and overheating the bar.▶ 8:21 A truck tensioner pulley failure adds a lost day; Joshua switches to a RAV and then forgets the mill guide rails, compounding delays.▶ 9:25 After producing one questionable slab in several hours of milling, he concludes that sourcing suitable boatbuilding timber locally is nearly impossible — regional sawmills report they haven't cut boat-grade stock since roughly 1995.▶ 20:23 One mill he previously bought larch decking from says it can mill clear framing stock within a month, shifting his plan away from self-harvesting toward a commercial supplier while he returns to prepping the hull for reframing.▶ 23:43
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