KUT News Now

JD Murphy has always loved tools and learning. A few years ago (with some help from YouTube), he taught himself about lumber milling, and now he spends his free time milling wood right in his driveway in Cedar Park, Texas. The hobby brings him joy and has helped him discover his creative side.

The full transcript of this episode of KUT News Now is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.

This Is My Thing: Lumber Milling!

[This is My Thing show opening]

Michael Lee [00:00:15] I’m Michael Lee and you’re listening to This Is My Thing. There’s a pretty good chance that this show came to you as part of the KUT News Now podcast feed, so it may or may not be a relief to hear that this show is absolutely not about the news in any way. I know it makes me happy. On This Is My Thing we talk to people about the things they do just for themselves – it’s not their job and it’s not a responsibility, it’s just a thing that brings them joy or feeds their soul.
This week, lumber milling!
That might sound like hard work, but the truth is that the milling of lumber is not always a job, and it does not always happen at a lumber mill. For the last few years. Today’s guest, J.D. Murphy, has found his joy in milling lumber right in his driveway in Cedar Park.

Michael Lee Let’s talk about lumber milling.

JD Murphy [00:01:13] Absolutely. One of my favorite subjects.

Michael Lee [00:01:16] I think most people are familiar with trees. A lot of people are familiar with pieces of lumber at a lumber yard. Lumber milling is basically turning one of those things into the other thing.

JD Murphy [00:01:25] Yeah, absolutely. So what I do is I get reclaimed lumber that I find, you know, wherever – people that are having trees cut down, tree services that I’m in contact with. And there’s actually a really great program through Austin Parks and Rec where they do a reclamation once a month on the first Friday of each month. And, I always go out to that. I actually take the day off. It’s like one of my release days, you know? It’s that that work-life balance that, that everybody talks about. So anyway, yeah, I go and get these logs from wherever I get them from, and then I bring them to my house and then kind of on my driveway, I just, I have a jack set up that I set the logs on, and then I’ve got the chainsaw mill that, that I slab them up with. I slice through the logs lengthways. And I get big live edge slabs, and you get inside the wood and you see what’s inside it. You see the grain patterns, and it’s just gorgeous to me. It’s it’s one of the most amazing things in the world.

Michael Lee [00:02:39] When did you start doing this?

JD Murphy [00:02:43] I started doing it about three years ago. I grew up in my grandfather’s garage and, like, I just would spend hours on end in there, like, looking at tools and trying to figure out what things could be used for and trying to identify things. And, and, you know, learning on my own pretty much, how to build stuff. And, and now that we have the internet, I mean, almost anything’s possible, right? Like, you can jump online and get on YouTube, and within 15 minutes you’ve gone through 2 or 3 different chainsaw milling videos, right? From the guy who’s doing it freehand to people that are actually doing really refined work, on huge slabs. So I kind of fall somewhere in the middle there. I’m doing pretty big slabs. And it gives me an opportunity to just kind of get into the log and see what it’s all about and see what’s there, and, and feel its curves and, you know, try to try to figure out the story that it’s trying to tell me. If it is. I hope it is.

[JD in his driveway] So what I’ve got here is, it’s a Husqvarna 390 XP. It’s a professional grade chainsaw. It’s an 88 CC saw. It runs about 7.5 horsepower. I’ve got a 36 inch bar on it with a ripping chain…

JD Murphy So I wound up finding a mill that a guy had on Craigslist, and I bought it from him, and I started working with it with my chainsaw. And I realized that I was very limited in the size of the pieces that I could cut, and that I would have to go and and do something else. So. So I decided, with a bonus that I got one year, I went and just bought a big chainsaw. Now I have a chainsaw that cuts like almost 30in. And, it’s just it’s a lot of fun. I mean, it’s it’s a big beast of a chainsaw, and it’s it’s fun to run.

Michael Lee [00:04:56] Tell me how it makes you feel, like when you’re doing the actual milling of the wood. When you’re in there, the saw is going and you’re in that log. What’s going on inside you?

JD Murphy [00:05:06] I am constantly looking at everything around me. It is like all of my senses. It’s like my Spidey senses are tingling, you know what I mean? Everything is I’m hyper focused on everything. I’m hyper focused on the sound of the saw, the way it feels in my hand, the speed of the chain. I’m looking at the bar and I’m looking back at the end. It’s coming out of the power head. I’m looking at the, the mill to make sure that it’s traveling along the log like it’s supposed to be. I am constantly looking and checking and waiting for something bad to happen. Right. And fortunately, nothing ever has (laughs).

Michael Lee [00:05:50] Because this is something that’s enjoyable for you, but it could be very dangerous.

JD Murphy [00:05:54] It’s extremely dangerous! But, you know, I was a jarhead. It was. It’s for me. It’s just dangerous enough (laughs)!

Michael Lee [00:06:08] I’ve seen your set up. You do take safety pretty seriously. You… describe a little bit the stuff that you’ve, that you use to protect yourself.

JD Murphy [00:06:16] Yeah. So I always wear ear protection. I try to make sure that I always have eye protection. You constantly have flying chips. There’s dust. You have to keep your eyes protected. I use a face mask, an N95 face mask when I’m cutting. I also wear Kevlar embedded chaps. When I’m using the saw. Because if the chain does happen to come off at some point, then the first place it seems to try to go to is your legs. I take this safety very seriously. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m so focused on what the SA is doing when I’m cutting is because of that safety factor as well.

Michael Lee [00:07:02] Something else that you mentioned when you wrote in about this – I’m going to be paraphrasing you here – but something to the effect that it lets you discover a creative side that you thought for 50 years you did not have.

JD Murphy [00:07:13] Yeah, absolutely. And like, I’ve always kind of felt like I wanted to draw and I wanted to make music, but I’ve never felt confident in my ability to do either of those things. Right. This gives me something that I can produce that with my ADHD and autism. It doesn’t have to be perfect, right? Like your end product is as perfect as it gets, and it’s all controlled by the speed of the saw, the hardness of the the timber, the sharpness of the chain, the humidity. Sometimes, you know, you have to accept what you’re given. And I think that’s one of the great things that that also sort of keeps me humble is, is you get what you put into it and you you have to be willing to accept what you got back out of it.

Michael Lee [00:08:09] This seems like it was a way for you to kind of discover the way that you can be an artist or a creator, and you maybe weren’t expecting it.

JD Murphy [00:08:17] Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I always wondered how sculptors saw things in pieces of stone or pieces of wood or, you know, having just that creative vision was never something that came easy for me. Like, I always looked at things and figured out, okay, well, that’s broken. This is how I fix it. So I’m creative in that way. And I’ve always understood that. But I always wanted to be creative in a way that that I take something and I create something else out of it, you know? And this gives me that opportunity. And man, I think people really enjoy it, you know, because people stop by the house all the time. And this is another reason I did it right during Covid, you know, not having that human connection. This gave me the opportunity to do something out on the front driveway that people thought was strange and cool and would stop and talk to me (laughs) So. So it was fulfilling a less than altruistic need to.

Michael Lee [00:09:14] I think for a lot of people this would feel like hard work – and I’m guessing it does a little bit for you as well – but it’s also you’re just having fun out there.

JD Murphy [00:09:22] Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was in the Marine Corps, you know, and we do kind of weird things for fun in the Marines. Like, you know, going on five mile runs and, in full packs and carrying weapons and things like that. So, like, hard work for me has never been anything that bothered me. I actually really enjoy going out and putting in, you know, a lot of hard work, and I don’t get to do that behind the computer. So getting out there and getting physical is one of those things that that, at my age, I’m, you know, in my 50s, it keeps me active. It keeps my mind constantly working. I’m constantly solving problems so that. I feel like keeps me in tip top mental condition, right? As well as giving me an outlet for exercise that’s not going to a gym, right? It’s not, like walking or something like that. And I, you know, after so many years in the Marine Corps, I just kind of hate hiking. My wife loves it, and I hate it, and I do it for her, but. But I still don’t really enjoy it. This kind of big, physical, hefty labor is something that really appeals to me, that appeals to kind of a primal instinct, I guess, in me or something that I feel like I need to be. I’m a I’m a big guy, six foot two, you know, 300 pounds. And I feel like I should be doing a lot of work (laughs).

Michael Lee [00:10:59] What kinds of woods are you working with now?

JD Murphy [00:11:01] So I’ve done cedar, cottonwood, pecan, live oak, post oak, blackjack oak, willow. I’ve done Himalayan cedar and I’ve done Asian pine. And both of those came from Austin Parks and Rec. They were actually trees that had been brought here to Austin and were planted in various places, like, I think at least one of them was at Zilker Park, if not both of them. And that’s one of the things that I really enjoy about, you know, is just trying to find out some of the history and provenance of these pieces, right? Like what park they came from. And, you know, how how long they were alive. Like, you can go visit the site and this is where my table came from (laughs).

Michael Lee [00:11:48] How does that make you feel?

JD Murphy [00:11:50] I it makes me feel so cool because I’m given new life to old things, right? I mean, most people, they drive past a log. They don’t give it to thoughts, right? They’re like, oh, somebody should clean that up. But what happens to it if it goes to like, someplace like the, the wood recyclers, right? Then they’re just going to chop it up into little pieces, and then you’re going to buy it back from them at Lowe’s or Home Depot and spread it on your, your, rose bushes. Right. This gives things a new life that that doesn’t have to be destructive. It doesn’t have to be like an end-of-life thing. Like these tables can live on for for generations. These pieces can live on for generations.

Michael Lee [00:12:35] And then once you’ve made that cut and you can see the inside and see the grain of the wood, what does that do for you?

JD Murphy [00:12:40] Oh, man. I just I think about what that tree went through over the course of his life that caused it to look like that. I try to put a story to it in my head. You know, maybe there’s growth abnormalities in the tree. And, like, I go back and I talk to the guy and he’s like, oh, yeah, well, this happened and that happened, and, and this sort of thing happens with this species. And those things are they just fascinate me. Like, I, I feel like I constantly want to learn. You know, I constantly want to learn every day. I need to learn something new. I need to find out something that I didn’t know. That’s that’s what fulfills me ultimately, is is finding out something that I didn’t know before.

Michael Lee [00:13:25] There’s something about looking at the inside of a tree and seeing the imperfections and the irregularities and seeing the beauty in them… that seems like it’s a lesson.

JD Murphy [00:13:35] Oh, and the force and the power. I mean, when they. When they dry. I’ve had times where I’ve cut apart a slab from from the main tree, from the main trunk. Right. And the surface of the wood immediately impresses because there was that much force that was holding it together. Right? So, like, you cut it out flat, but then the second you release that tension, it’s sucked in to itself. Right? And then it dries, you know, all kinds of wonky because all of that, all of that internal pressure was relieved in a specific way. And, you know, you’ve got the grain going in a specific way. And it’s going to it’s going to dry based on how that that grain pattern is in that, in that piece of lumber. It’s just to me it’s incredible. Like it’s just like it’s a it’s a never ending story. It’s constantly evolving.

Michael Lee [00:14:32] And you’re a part of it.

JD Murphy [00:14:34] Yeah, absolutely. I’m a spectator. I just want to be a spectator of life. I want to see at the end of the day, I know I have a finite amount of time here in this form. And when that finite amount of time is over, I want to have experienced as much as I possibly can.

[JD in his driveway] [00:15:01] Woo-hoo! And that’s how you do that.

[Theme music]

Michael Lee [00:15:17] Thanks for listening to This Is My Thing. I’m Michael Lee and I produce This Is My Thing. Special thanks, of course, to JD Murphy for sharing his love of lumber milling with us.
We’ve got a lot more This Is My Thing coming soon. We have recently talked to a student train conductor, an aggressive roller skater, and a LEGO builder. Keep listening to hear those stories and more. If you’d like to tell us about your thing, and maybe be a part of a future episode of the show, that’s easy. Just go to the This Is My Thing show page@cut.org. You’ll find a form on that page that I’ll let you tell us about your thing. And just so you know, there are other forms on KUT’s website as well, like the one you can fill out to become a member of the station. Our members make this and everything we do possible.

[Theme music]

Laurie Gallardo [00:16:22] Support for This Is My Thing comes from locally owned Eckert Insurance. Worry less, live more.

This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.