Handmade Builds Character.

The three bents above are the results of a chalk line, a chain saw, and some time.  I milled eight by eights with a frequently sharpened Johnsered with a 16 inch bar.  The rest was done with a handsaw and a few old chisels.  But the fun part emerges in the sort of random details that came out of the process.  After floating in the lake for over a year, two of the logs had been ground down by shoreline rocks.  The lower left of this shows the wear from the rocks.  The result of strangely shaped 8 X 8's was that each joint had to be custom measured.  The mortise and tenon work had to be measures from the outside, and a little extra "milling" was needed after the fact to make things square.  All in all, it worked out OK.