Milling Bookmatched Redwood Sequoia Slabs on the Sawmill

We had a local arborist drop more redwood sequoia logs off a few weeks ago and this was the last log. The other two were solid all of the way through the sap wood while this one had no viable sapwood left. From time to time, we have logs dropped off that just go straight to firewood. We do try to salvage as many as possible. We were able to still salvage quite a bit from this log.

Live edge milling was the plan until we had to square it off into a cant to get rid of all of the soft sap wood. We then decided to mill it into bookmatched slabs. They were all 8/4 or 2 inches thick and around 5 ft in length. The log was 46 inches at one end and 36 at the other. Butt ends of sequoia logs have some incredible taper to them.

We ended up with slabs that were around 19 inches wide which makes the bookmatches right around 36 inches wide finished. These only need 6 months of air drying before they go into the kiln.