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Jake Moug, owner of Moug Custom Woodworks, was milling the last 12-inch-long cant from a large maple tree when his saw blade squealed like a banshee.
The unidentified foreign object had made his blade belly up ½ inch before he was able to stop the mill. He knew he hit something solid, but what?
He broke the slab off and recovered his saw blade, and smack dab in what had been the middle of a 40-inch-diameter maple tree was a rusted sprinkler head from an irrigation system.
“I had never seen a sprinkler head that old,” Moug said.
Strange objects get absorbed into trees all the time, only to be uncovered by astonished sawyers on the front lines of the wood manufacturing process years later.
A collection of such stories comes from the Internet woodworking industry website WoodWeb.com. Here are some highlights of the strangest found objects:
1. A sawyer in California was processing an aged oak tree when he nicked a small metal box. He dated the box to the 1800s, because inside he discovered a quantity of gold dust and flakes, presumably from a miner during the gold rush.
2. Another sawyer lost all 60 carbide saw tips—which cost $6 each—on each saw in his scragg mill after hitting seven railroad spikes and an 8-inch lag screw that a hunter drove into the tree to set up a tree stand.
3. A sawyer was cutting a junk oak log full of holes. One in particular was also the home of a mouse who didn’t get the message that he should have moved out. The mouse would pop its head out of the hole and duck right before the blade would have had his head. The blade-and-mouse game went on for six boards, when finally, halfway through the next cut, three mice popped out of the hole and ran the length of the board.
4. Maybe the heaviest object ever found in a tree was an anvil. Someone must have set it in the crotch of tree a couple hundred years ago, the sawyer wrote.
5. A 12-inch straight knife from an old Vonnegut molder broke apart and flew upward into the ceiling after hitting a 50 caliber metal jacket round in the wood. The knife flew with enough force to penetrate the subfloor and the maple flooring installed on the story above them.