Found out today that the three p/u loads of wood I scored on was box elder and not elm. My bad! Good thing is, I hope to be buying a band saw and wood lathe (yeah right!) and maybe I will be using the elder for "stuff". Already told 99 lbs about my plans for the wood and she looked at me skeptically and asked "How much do you need?" Maybe she was asking about the prices of a new band saw and wood lathe????
Yeah, Box elder isn't too bad. If you keep your eye out for an old wood lathe, you can pick one up pretty cheap.
The saw and lathe will run about 2K and then you have to buy the accessories such as the blades, fences, knives, chucks, and I'm sure there's more such as a place (workshop to be built) with a dust collector, planer/jointer, sander, improved table saw...and maybe a portable sawmill so I can save money on wood.
I built a couple workbenches for my shop that I can use with my 17" vertical bandsaw (Grizzly 513, 12.5" resaw capacity) to saw logs. Got the idea from this youtube video: I mount a Pony deep-reach pipe clamp to my sled instead; I think it works better than the system in the video, because you don't need to screw into the end of the log to mount it to the sled. Big savings over a horizontal bandsaw mill, albeit more difficult to use, because the log needs to be raised ~37" onto the table.
Oh and you WILL want dust collection, even if it's just a shop vac. You will produce a LOT of sawdust.
Box elder is not as bad as some say. It won't compare with oak but it will do a good job for you in the spring or fall. In addition, being a maple, it tends to dry fairly quick. And yes, you can make some beautiful things with that wood.
