Urban Salvage Lumber
I harvest my own wood from trees that are given to me. Often times the trees would be cut up as firewood or disposed of in some other way. Some of the trees have blown over in storms, some where removed due to poor health and a few were removed because they just got too big and were threatening the owners home. Doing something good for the environment would be a good enough reason to justify milling my own wood. Another benefit is thatmuch of the wood I use is from species that are known for their fine quality lumber but are not commercially available. This includes woods like camphor, monterey cypress, american elm, and black acacia. The gallery below is all the different woods that I have milled, you can click on each image to view a larger picture and you can hover over the larger image for a little info about the properties and uses for that wood. The wood itself is not for sale but clients can commission a work made from any of the wood I have in my inventory.
While harvest is the correct term for converting a tree into lumber its not exactly like going out to your garden and picking tomatoes for your dinner salad. An eight foot long 36" diameter log can weigh in excess of 3,000 lbs. A log this size will generally yield 8-10 2" thick slabs and more than a cubic yard of sawdust. Using a 111cc chainsaw with a 42' bar it takes 10 minutes to cut each slab which will weighs nearly 200 lbs. Milling such a tree is a full day of hard labor and will require between 1-2 years of curing time before the wood can be used
