Update on the move

Just a quick update on the upcoming move from where we are now to 300' south.

We have engaged an architect, decided on a building design and a builder, and now we await their coordinated effort. The City required the architect for a site plan and to make sure we are informed about whatever details goes with that sort of thing. We clearly will not have the building up and ready for the move by the end of July when our lease expires, so my expectations are now to move the last week or two of August, assuming it is ready by then.

We will be interested in a limited amount of help, for which we are willing to exchange wood. Too many helpers might be chaos, but we will need people at each end unloading inventory and reloading it into the new building. I will post here with details on dates, times, numbers needed and so on. My thinking is that we will be doing much of this on a weekend or two. If you can help us for a day, let me know when I post here about dates.

Fortunately, we acquired a forklift that will greatly aid the move. Stay tuned for more info!

One thing you can be sure of: we will be taking our precious pair of number one priorities. Note that correct grammer is not one of them.

curly white oak!

The first kiln load is finally out and on the racks. We loaded it last fall and waited much longer than usual for the sun to come out and help us dry it. So long, in fact, that I had completely forgotten that a large percentage of the plain and rift and quarter sawn wood in there was the curliest oak we have ever had. I naturally forgot to take my camera, so pictures will have to wait. But if you have a Craftsman era piece on your list and you want some special wood for it, come take a look.

We threw all cuts into one bin and will have a completely new price schedule for the curly stuff. I am trying to resist under-pricing the rare awesome stuff like I have so many times in the past, so the prices will seem high when compared to our regular $2-4 range for white oak, but when you compare it to all the other curly white oak prices you have seen... oh wait, maybe you never really see it. I haven't, and I look at wood everywhere I go. (I know, I know, I need to get out more).

Here they are:

PS $4.75/bf
RS $5.75/bf
QS $6.75/bf

Technically, this curly wood is from a burr oak log (Quercus macrocarpa), not white oak (Q. alba). All oak lumber is either white or red in the trade even though only two of the many species are Q. alba or Q rubra. So while burr (or bur) oak is a white oak, it is slightly different than the Q. alba we always use for our other white oak inventory. One difference I have noted is that in the QS cut, the medullary rays of burr oak tend to be thinner than the fat rays of Q. alba. They are just as long and make a striking look, slightly less wild looking.

If this curly stuff is like other curly oak I have tried to work, there will be tearout issues when jointing and planing, especially with deep cuts and dull blades.

storm damage

Normally the yield of lumber worthy logs from storms is less than you'd think. Yes, plenty of trees get damaged and ultimately removed, but many seem to get totally destroyed when falling or land on a house and need to come out in small pieces. Neither situation yields anything a sawmill would be interested in. There are plenty of situations like this today from the tornado that touched down recently. But the damage path is so long that there is lots of good recyclable material too. The number of tree removals will be huge this year. Spring is normally a busy season for urban log recycling since homeowners finally come out and look around outside and notice that something is wrong with the tree. So Joe is working long days now since he is getting a load or two of logs per day from the storm on top of his regular supply.

I doubt any municipality is really prepared for the scale of damage they are now dealing with. Certainly the smaller ones with a couple guys that cut grass all summer are not. So when Joe showed up on a street full of work trucks and sees two guys standing around a log and another downed tree, he asked if he could help. He made short work of the log, loading it in minutes. The crane is an awesome and fun power tool. "What about that other one?" Joe asks. "Well, maybe you could help," came the reply. "Do you have a saw?"

Does Joe have a chain saw? HA! That is like asking a gunfighter if he carries bullets. So Joe says nothing, calmly opens the tool box on the truck, pulls out the Stihl 260, sets it down, pulls out the Stihl 460, sets it down, reaches in and pulls out the Stihl 660 with 36 inch bar, fires it up, cuts off the root ball, removes the top and any branches and tries not to notice the reverent gaze and slack jaws on the others. "Yeah, it looks like you can help us." Two business cards and a short speech later and now we are getting calls from another group glad they do not have to chunk up perfectly good logs with dinky Homelite saws.

NOTE ABOUT THE GALLERY: I know it is missing. I went to add some more pictures of projects made from our wood and clicked "save as a draft" not knowing that the button really meant "Bwa ha ha ha. Gotcha!" The gallery immediately reverted to an ancient version and my efforts to figure out what how who soon lead to it disappearing altogether. I still do not know what or how, but I think I know who. If I can work it out, it will return. Not as a draft though.

We need to move

It appears that we will have to move this summer. Not far, but still a major task.

Our landlord thinks commercial rents have gone up 120%+ in the last five years. We disagree. We can go to the parking lot adjacent to where we are now (access from Farlin, not Brown), but it has no building. So we need to build a structure and move the log and lumber inventory and solar kiln during our busiest season for log hauling. Oh what joy.

There are numerous details to work out, and it is probable we could use your help. Watch this space for detailed notices, but we will probably be willing to trade lumber for labor. Certainly when it comes to pulling wood from the bins and the dismantling and reassembly of the bins themselves. That part will probably occur in July, assuming we tackle big hurdles like erecting a new structure etc. It seems  silly to move out of one shabby shed, go 300' away and move into a freshly erected shabby shed, but that is what it looks like is going to happen.

If you have city construction expertise or know people that erect metal buildings, please respond here or shoot me an email. We are gathering information and are all ears right now.

The good news is that, in a way, we get to start from scratch knowing what we now know. So hopefully things will be better than ever once we settle in.

Stay tuned. This will likely be a major blog focus for the next 6 months.

some new wood in

Joe picked up two trailer loads of freshly cut lumber from our guy in Illinois this week. Poplar is not very photogenic, but persimmon looks better fresh cut than it does dry. So here is a shot of some persimmon:

The true color is the dry patch in the upper left. The black bits will all be checks and of course when dry it might look more like a pretzel.

We set aside a birch log last spring to spalt. Our track record on purposely spalting wood is not perfect, but this baby came out just fine thanks. I managed to sneak a picture before more got stacked on top of it:

The spalting goes the full length and we will have a number of these in 4/4 and 8/4 when dry. Joe even scavenged a few offcuts that the sawyer would normally not bother keeping for us:

It will be late fall or next year before this stuff is dry and in the bins for sale. But it is okay to start dreaming now.

more new photos

Check out our gallery for new pictures. Note that I do not make any comments about the work since it would sound too much like an overly proud parent; it is amazing to see what you make from our wood.

Weather and the typical day

I wanted this blog to give you a better feel for what this urban logging thing actually is like on a day to day basis, yet I have clearly dragged my feet on writing up any particulars. The problem is partly because I figure words without pictures bore most people and taking pictures of a typical day for Joe (he is the one out there every day picking up logs) is a problem for me since I have a day job too. Partly because I must be lazy.

So rather than never providing the inside story, here is a glimpse without pictures. Joe is usually at work before my dog wakes me for his morning walk. He may trim a few logs from yesterday's loads and scan them for metal and pile them in one of three sawmill piles. He loves starting his day with the soothing sound of a chain saw. Different strokes and all. In the busier months, his calendar for pickups can go out 2 or 3 days. Tree services, municipalities, cemeteries, golf courses, and others call him when they remove trees and need the logs removed. Tree services that specialize in removals have learned fairly quickly that not needing to cut a stout log into chunks and hauling those chunks to the dump and paying to grow a landfill is a valuable time and money saving step. We haul for free. Even a home owner with one fat walnut log soon learns that free removal is cheaper than trying to get that log to a mill where it can be converted to cash. Aggregation is the only economic answer. We are aggregation. Still, to be honest, there is not enough money in log hauling for free to cover a big truck and a driver.

Removals generate more waste than just logs. Grinders take care of the smaller branches (some grind up to 18" material!), but occasionally we are asked to haul material that is not sawmill worthy and for this we charge a fee. Again, it can be a huge time and money saver for those who keep their business focussed. I have mentioned this before, but a key part of the economic equation for us is the lumber sales end.

Anyway, back to Joe's day. He may pick up a load or two of logs, haul some chunk wood, and then come back to the lot and load David's truck for a trip to a sawmill. David is an independent trucker who might haul ice cream one day and logs the next. Different trailers. He is reliable and seems fond of Christmas cards with sparkly snowmen on them. While our truck can haul ~2000 board feet of logs, his 18 wheeler can haul twice that. Plus, since most of the 3 or 4 mills we use are at least a 3 hour round trip, Joe simply does not have the time make these runs himself. So David is a big help even though it is relatively expensive to haul low value material. More than 90% of the log volume is simply undesirable grade and/or species that becomes nothing more than blocking or pallet. This is what a "loss leader"
business is all about. Suppliers have little reason to just give us the best 5% if we don't take it all. Still, I can clearly see why most urban loggers try to find a way to only work the good stuff.

Anyway, you can see that all of this is pretty darn weather dependent and that is why this is a slow time for Joe. When temperatures are below 15 or 20 degrees F, the hydraulics on the truck tend to balk or not work at all. Anyone know how they get hydraulics to work up north? When days are long and every chain saw in town is dropping trees, he has some pretty long days. He drank an awful lot of water this past summer.

My typical day is different. Once a week I make a trip to the PO box, write a few checks and make a bank deposit. Then I head to my desk job and wrestle a mouse. Not very weather dependent.