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The Traveling Lumberjock

22K views 29 replies 18 participants last post by  Shell 
#1 ·
The idea

I work for a scientific instrument company and end up traveling for my job quite a bit. I mostly stay in the US, but I visit Canada a couple times a year and occasionally travel to England and other parts of Europe.

I got tired of bringing knick-knacks home for the family from every trip because I'm running out of room for refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs! I had the bright idea earlier this year that instead of knick-knacks, I'll try to find some local wood from wherever I'm visiting and bring a bit home. I've done this a couple times now and it's pretty cool. It's a bit like a treasure hunt looking for local sawyers and sources for wood.

So far I've had good luck with craigslist for wherever under materials. People with a portable (or not so portable mill) frequently advertise sawing services there.

I've not found a whole lot using WoodFinder.com, but it's a resource. There's always google searches for "City name" and sawmill, lumber, etc…

I sometimes call a couple local cabinetry shops and chat with them about potential local sources of lumber.

Call me crazy if you will, but I'm having a lot of fun and meeting some interesting people. I'm going to try and document what I find (both good and bad). Hope it's interesting.
 
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#2 ·
Nice idea. How do you transport it? Car? Any issues with customs?

We did a cruise to Jamaica and I picked up some local mahogany. Should be enough for a guitar. It was soaking wet freshly cut wood. It took another 3 days to get home and it even dried a bit during that time.

When I got home I waxed the ends and stacked the pieces on a high shelf in the garage where it gets pretty warm in the summer. It's been 2 years and it's fairly dry now, especially here in Colorado where it's very dry most all the time.

One of these days I'll make an acoustic out of it.
 
#3 ·
sounds like a cool and great idea! I definitely would love to hear about the details - good and bad.

what I also found amusing was your (assuming) typo about you sometimes calling a couple local cab. shops and shatting with them… although if you fix it, it won't be as amusing anymore ;)
 
#4 ·
Transport is typically a cardboard box and lots of packing tape. Besides my normal checked bag, I can take up to two 75 pound boxes at no extra cost as long as they're not too big. Let's hear it for Frequent Flyer status!

As for customs, I haven't tried to transport anything internationally. I suspect that would be a pain in the butt, unless I can draw on it with a marker or something and pass it off as art, lol!

PurpLev - thanks for that catch - it was amusing, even more so as the stupid spell check didn't catch it! I did correct it though, sigh… Getting old and conservative. Shooting the …. with cabinetshop guys is pretty much dead on accurate though!
 
#5 ·
Steve,

I think it's a great idea.

I also do this, as I am frequently travelling in Asia. Unfortunately, the amount of wood that I can take with me is very limited due to air travel. As such, I will only get some special and small pieces of wood that I can take with me very easy. My plan is to make accent pieces of this for larger projects (such as drawer pulls and so on) from these small pieces.

It's a good way to have some fun, go some places beyond the normal hotels, meeting rooms and other work/travel related places and of course meet people and get some inspiration.

For me, woodworking is a nice hobby, and in this way I can still enjoy my hobby during business travels.

I am curious to see what you will find during your travels. Good luck!

Jan
 
#7 ·
I wanted to do this when I traveled from California to Illinois this past week for my Mom's 90th Birthday party, but my sisters had me on a tight schedule of social stuff and the wood places were all too far away.
Robert
 
#8 ·
I drive around with a folding saw and a pair of gloves in my SUV. I've hauled cherry, black walnut and honey locust home from nearby neighborhoods and when we visit my husband's kinfolk in Georgia, I try to meander down the farm's woodlands. Last Christmas I found several burled cherry saplings that may make some nice cane shafts and I coerced a cousin to let me cut off a piece of an ugly healed branch of an 80 yr. old pecan tree that looks like it will have some interesting figure of cane handles. Not quite the big boy lumberjack antics, but not too shabby for a lumberjill!
 
#9 ·
Sacramento, California

Week of July 12, 2010 - I fly to Sacramento and head up to Woodland, CA. I'm loving the name and I know there's tons of walnut in the area from a previous visit a couple years ago. I start digging and end up hooking up with a guy who has a firewood company. I've had some decent firewood pile finds (Osage Orange, spalted ash, etc) so I drive over to 8320b (barn) Hazel Ave. Orangevale, CA 95662.

Turns out his big business is natural pest control products (like ladybugs, praying mantis, etc). The guy was nice enough. He had some milled lumber air drying in a barn and TONS of wood lying around that was suitable only for firewood <whimper>. Firewood guy's prices were high and he wasn't interested in making a deal for something small. I ended up buying a chunk of camphor log from him for $10. I'm thinking it wasn't much of deal, but, what the heck. I'll get it home and mill up some camphor wood and have something to play with from this trip. I wanted to grab a chunk of acacia too, but… shrug. I'm glad I ended up not wasting any more time on this one, because a LJ post I made led me to John Ormsby, a contractor and fellow lumberjock in the Sacramento area.

...........................................

I went by to visit John, was blown away by his shop, and ended up having dinner with him and his wife. Talk about nice folks. I intended to stay maybe half an hour and ended up visiting with them for 5! I also ended up making off with an off cut of quilted maple that John was kind enough to throw my way. Another piece that demands pics when I get home.

It's pretty funny that John was constantly saying his shop was a mess and not fit for company. I'm using my entire two car garage and am crammed in so tight that moving around is hazardous. It was so spacious and well laid out in his shop that I'm seriously going to have to rethink my layout. Of course with 4-6 times my space…. Anyway - Kudos to the Ormsby's for kindness to a stranger, sharing some great shop tips, and a great evening. If you need restoration or contractor work done in the Sacramento area, definitely look John up. The pics he showed me of the restoration jobs he's directed or worked on were beautiful.

Amusingly enough, John turned out to be within a couple miles of the firewood guy I visited the day before. They had met and John wasn't impressed with the lumber/prices either. I think the general impression was "We can buy good stuff from Cook's up in Oregon for about the same price, so why risk ungraded local air-dried at that price?"

...........................................

I had one more evening to kill before my flight home so I made a few more calls and ended up meeting up with Frank Sieferman, Jr.. Frank's a great guy (semi-retired arborist) with a sawing problem. He has more chainsaws than I've ever seen in one place barring stores and repair shops. I mean I think his chainsaws when combined might have more horsepower than my four door Chevy S10 pickup! That combined with a Timber King mill and a passion for sawing wood to bring out its best character means I thought I was dead and in heaven for an afternoon/evening.

Frank treats the ends of all his logs with anchorseal and Timbor (or some equivalent Powderpost Beetle/Insect control). The vast majority of his lumber is quartersawn and has NICE figure. I ended up coming home with some "scrap" pieces of walnut, California sycamore, elm, and eucalyptus. I've played with sycamore before, but the figure on the stuff he had was amazing. It looked more like lacewood than sycamore. I guess a big part of it is paying close attention to cutting parallel to the ray structure in the trunk cross-section.

I've already taken a bit of that walnut and sycamore and am working on a travel case for my small screwdriver set so I've got a "show and tell" piece. Talk about some bling! I'm definitely posting pics when I'm done.

Frank's got a pretty nice shop setup and while he's not a woodworker per-se, he's got a guy named Josh who looks like he's got some talent.

Again, Frank had met firewood guy and wasn't impressed. He was there on a day when another guy with a wood mizer was there sawing up an acacia log and "maybe" saved it from being butchered. I say that with reservations, because none of firewood guy's lumber has the endgrain sealed and I doubt he's doing any pest control despite being in the natural pest control business (should I laugh or cry?).

...........................................

So Sacramento was the most fun I've had on a trip in ages. I'm looking forward to more sawmill adventures.

And if anyone wants Frank's contact info, send me a message and I'll message it to you. If you're in the Sacramento area, it's (IMHO) very worth a trip up to Zamora to have a look at his lumber and logs. It's not the cheapest stuff out there, but I was impressed with how much good quality wood he has.
 
#14 ·
July 21, 2010 - Richmond, VA

So it was off to Virginia last week. I've been going to Richmond pretty regularly for four to five years now and I really enjoy the area. It's beautiful, there's a ton of historical stuff in the area, and of course now that I'm visiting sawmills and lumberjocks, there's no shortage of wood and sawdust themed adventures.

This was something of a short notice trip, so I didn't have much chance to plan visits or scope folks with portable sawmills. Oddly enough though one of the ladies at the plant I was visiting had some acreage and I ended up going out to visit with her and her husband. It was quite exciting for me because by chance the discussion of chestnut trees and lumber came up. Turns out they have TWO chestnut trees alive and well on their property that they were wanting to cut down. I'd never seen a chestnut tree in person because thanks to a fungal blight that came over from Asia back in the early nineteen hundreds (1904 give or take), what was once a very common tree in the american forest is now borderline extinct.

In my attempt to be ever the polite guest, I picked up a couple pizzas from Bottoms Up, a local pizza joint, which makes fantastic pizza. If you ever have the chance try the Chesapeake. It's a white pizza with crab and old bay seasoning. I was prepared to be unimpressed but it was super tasty. Even Brenda, a self professed ham and pineapple pizza girl liked it.

After getting to see the trees which had trunks about two feet in diameter (I'll see if I can get a couple pictures from Brenda to post later) I pulled a couple twigs with leaves off and picked up a couple husks to see if we could ID the exact species (website here). As it turns out, there's five species to consider. I'm pretty comfortable saying these trees were NOT pure american chestnut, but were probably a hybrid Japanese/American variety. I learned a lot about chestnuts but the lesson that stuck with me the most was that even old chestnut burrs are REALLY FREAKING SHARP and hard. Yeah, I had to cut a spine out of a finger even though I was handling them very delicately. Sigh…

I'm not sure how I feel about taking chestnut lumber from a live tree, but I guess if they're going to cut it down, better lumber than firewood. I'm not sure there's any value to collecting some seeds and forwarding them to the TACF, but I may see if anyone wants some.

The land owners are also planning on cutting down three decent size (two foot diameter) eastern black walnut trees. They asked me if I wanted one for lumber and I was like - um, SURE! They've got a friend with a wood mizer, so we'll see what happens. I think they're going to let me air dry it in a barn for a while, so I suspect at some point a road trip from Texas to Richmond and back will be in order to collect the haul of walnut. If it ends up happening I'm going to bring them some nice piece of furniture when I come up to pick things up.

If I end up with some walnut from Virginia, it will sure have a story. I like pieces to have a story. People may forget or the story may get lost, but if a piece is beautiful and will outlast me, maybe it will end up making more stories long after I'm gone.

I did talk to a few folks with sawmills, but I was on such a tight schedule I just didn't have time to visit any of them so I can't make any recommendations one way or the other. For my and others reference, next time I get out there, I'm going to try and visit:

Logs to Lumber - (804) 271-3840. Talked to the guy on the phone seemed nice enough.

HomeGrownWoodProducts - I talked to Joe he seemed nice and I like the direction he's going with the whole urban forestry lumber approach.

And that was my Richmond trip in a nutshell (of several varieties). LOL. That whole story and I drop a goofy punchline.

--Follow Up and Previews---

If any of you lumberjocks are in the Richmond area and want me to drop by for a visit, drop me a line and I'll let you know the next time I'm headed out. I'm going to be up in Canada next week about half way between Montreal and Toronto, right on the US/Canadian border. If you're in the area, same story, maybe I can swing by some evening.

I'm writing this from Chattanooga, TN which has also been an altogether pleasant trip. I'm dragging home about twenty board feet of cherry. Should be interesting trying to get THAT home on a plane.
 
#15 ·
Well, I'm a bit further north about 4 hrs. drive in Maryland. I live in a well treed suburban area and a neighbor cut down a huge black walnut tree and before they completely chipped it into mulch I salvaged 5 moderate sized logs. The main trunk was healthy and large and the wood was such a deep chocolate brown you couldn't see the grain. It was so disheartening to see such beautiful wood go into a chipper. Had I known that they were going to cut it down I would have tried to educate them into selling or giving the tree to someone who would salvage it for lumber, not mulch.

I've recently acquired a 5×5x36" piece of Am. Chestnut from a fellow in the central region. It's green and I should have had him resaw it down to 2 or 3" slabs, as it's going to be tricky to saw this one down.

I have purchased some very nice Honduran Rosewood Burl from Mike of Logs to Lumber.

Good luck on your future lumber adventures. I look forward to reading more of your journey.
 
#18 ·
Trenton, GA (Not far from Chattanooga, TN) - July 28, 2010 (w/ pics this time!)

NOTES: A lot of interesting stuff on this trip so I'm breaking it up into separate days. If you want to see the high res picture, click on the embedded picture and it will open a new browser window with the full high res version.

This trip has been REALLY cool. There were a few issues, like my luggage not making it here. I guess I was due since this is the first time in five years of hard traveling it's not made it to my destination. I've had it get delayed coming home once or twice but that doesn't bother me since they just come drop it on my porch and it's not like I don't have a toothbrush and clean underwear at home.

To start with, check out this oak burl I noticed in someone's yard on my way to the plant. I'm pretty sure that's about 2 1/2-3 feet long and 1 1/2 foot in diameter. I was so tempted to go ask the homeowner if I could saw it off and paint the cut spot on the tree, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to do it.



BUT! ON TO THE GOOD STUFF! In my spare time Wednesday I went out to visit the nice folks at L. Cuzzort Custom Sawing in Trenton, GA. Their contact info is at the bottom. I called ahead and asked if I could come by because it was already pushing six pm. At first I thought it was going to be a no go because they were having a little birthday celebration for Lem's son in law that evening, but they said come on out and we'll run down to the mill and have a look around, so, off I went. I grabbed a twelve pack of cold beer on the way, because if you're going to crash a party, you should come bearing gifts, right?

Anyway, I got there and there was a piece of steak waiting for me. We knocked back a few cold longnecks and headed down to the mill. Lem (his full name is Lemowen) has what I think is an older Timber King mill. I didn't pay a lot of attention to it because they've got a brand spanking new Timber King 2000 on order and are expecting it any time now. Drool, drool, drool…

Lem's partner in crime is a lady named Michelle who is quite the LumberJill. She mentioned lumberjocks.com in our conversation, but I'm not sure she's active on the site right now. Shrug. She's much more into producing the lumber than using it.

These folks are super nice and have what seemed to me to be pretty good prices. Their wood is all air dried, and they advertise themselves as rough cut lumber. I admired some 10"x10"x8' white oak beams that I'm wanting to say were about $65. They've got lots of red and white oak, some eastern black walnut, a bit of sycamore, some hickory, and who knows what else might come in at some point. The wood is in stored in a barn so it's not getting rained on but this is all pretty green stuff, because they don't have a kiln and none of it had been sitting long. I ended up snagging a 6' long 12" wide 3" thick slab of cherry for $10. It has some checks and flaws that I'm going to have to work around and it's only been drying for about six months, so they gave me a good deal. On the bright side, one side is cut smack through the middle of the tree, so I've got a quarter sawn face that is quite nice. Once I get it home, it's going to need more drying time or a trip to a neighboring kiln, but, shrug…

Sorry I didn't get more pictures of this visit, but here's the

Cherry Slabs



If you're in the Chattanooga area or northwestern Georgia, it might be worth talking to these folks.

L. Cuzzort Custom Sawing
1374 Saddle Club Rd
Trenton, GA 30752

Sawmill 706-657-8840

Lemowen Cuzzort 423-653-3830
Michelle Daniels 423-503-6967
 
#19 ·
Gee, I would have been ringing that doorbell! Only problem is getting up there to saw the thing!

Nice slabs. Looks like you have lots more room in that truck.
 
#21 ·
South Pittsburg, TN (Near Chattanooga, TN) July 29, 2010

150,000 BF/day SAWMILL TOUR with pics!

NOTES: A lot of interesting stuff on this trip so I'm breaking it up into separate days. If you want to see the high res picture, click on the embedded picture and it will open a new browser window with the full high res version.

I managed to get over to Cardin Forest Products today. I drove by Wednesday but the office shuts down at four and I wasn't sure I wanted to just go strolling up into as busy and big a sawmill operation as these guys are running, unexpected and unannounced. Might get squished by one of their loaders…

I don't know quite what I was expecting but I ended up getting the five dollar tour and I took lots of pictures to share with everyone because it was AWESOME!!! To start with their office is ok looking on the outside, but when you get out back, they have this deck.



The view from the deck is pretty amazing.



Their pond (dare I call it that?) looks like an old quarry to me. The edges go straight down and it looks like it's pretty deep. And to top it off, my fisherman's nose was right on. There's fish in them thar' waters. They feed them from the deck, so I pitched some feed over the deck and lookie lookie - a school of 20+ big ole catfish came over to visit. Pic isn't great, and you'll have to look close to see them, but how's that for a back yard for your office?!



Like a lot of these type companies, Cardin Forest Products is a family operation. Jerrod Cardin was kind enough to show me around. He's a third generation sawmill operator. His grandfather started their company back in the thirties. Let's hear it for American industry! Anyway their facility can process a whopping 150,000 board feet of oak (or other hardwood) lumber a day. It's pretty high tech since they just moved to this location from their old site about nine years ago.

Let me start this off by showing you some of the blades for their band saw. I'm now feeling seriously inadequate about my 20" Delta with a 137" blade. These suckers are 47 FEET long. And they go through about 6-8 of them a day. Needless to say they have onsite automated sharpening and tooth setting tools.



.
Here's the process of log to lumber.

They load the logs up into a feed conveyor and it goes into the Debarker. This thing can strip the bark from a sixteen+ foot long log in under ten seconds. I wish the picture showed it better but there's a cutter that spins around inside a ring and it's self centering so it's really good about getting all bark and no wood.



From there it moves in to this straight line cutter, where it gets converted to a great big square post. There's a guy you can't really see who's running this but it's got these great big hydraulic pincers and it grabs the log sets the appropriate angle pretty much automatically based off the initial cut and WHIIRRRRR, back turn, WHIIRRRRR, back, turn, WHIRRRRR, back turn, WHIRRRRRR done. It takes like about another 20 seconds to go from debarked bole to square post.



Once they've got a nice straight square post, the post moves along to the ripper where it gets ripped by their Ripper. The interesting thing here is they run it through this big band saw and the cut piece of lumber gets kicked over to the left. The remaining now rectangular post gets rotated on its axis 90 degrees and goes to the right on a big U shaped conveyor that brings it back to the band saw. By doing it this way, they get the most number of wide boards. You can visualize it by thinking the blade cuts parallel to the left side, the bottom, the right side, then the top and repeat. Seeing this process makes me understand why I see so much flatsawn lumber. This cutting sequence produces little to no quartersawn lumber. Depending on the log quality, the vast majority of these pieces are your FAS lumber.



So these guys are REALLY efficient. You know all those little scrappy pieces (mostly sapwood) that get cut off in the process of straightlining to make the post? That wood and some other stuff that gets gang ripped gets sent over to this machine which has a whole bunch of laser beam "eyes". Most of these pieces are somewhat trinagular because of the taper of the tree trunk. The conveyor stops and the piece gets scanned. In the operators booth it shows a nifty little graphic of wood and bark. The computer program running this thing makes some calculations then it gets moved forward, grabbed, angled just so and the most optimal piece of what will end up as Number 1 Common or Number 2 or 3 whatever (minimum 3" wide, 4' long - think "pallet wood") gets cut.



And finally when the various lines are done, all the lumber gets run out of the plant to get stacked and shipped somewhere. It's sorted by width and grade and even though none of it getting kiln dried at this site, it typically doesn't get transported more than half an hour to an hour away before it gets kiln dried and sent on to a buyer.

Don't quote me on this but if my calculations are right, from log with bark to sawed up lumber ready for grading, can take less than a minutes when they're running well. A big part of that is just moving through the various processing points.

When we were talking about the different grades, drying, and final destinations for the different piles I was bummed to find out that the vast majority of their 12"+ wide pieces get sent to China. I guess furniture manufactured there from American oak can be sent back here and it's cheaper from a labor standpoint. Sigh.

Because these guys are such high volume, they really didn't have anything that was airplane transportable at the moment. They do occasionally run walnut and hickory, but their volume is so huge they have to stockpile the non-oak lumber for a month or more before they've got enough to change over the operational stuff to saw it. Cherry and other nice logs that get bought or acquired when clearing a parcel get sold on to other mills that have a smaller volume I guess. So I didn't take anything away but some pictures and a cool experience, but I can't say that I regret it one bit.

If you need a LOT of lumber, the Cardin family might be able to take care of you. I've never had any experience with a larger operation like this. I didn't even ask about pricing so I can't say whether they're a good deal or not, but since the company is something like 70 years old they must be doing something right.

And speaking of old, on my way back to town I stopped to grab a drink. Here's your random old car pic. This is a sweeeeeeeeet old dodge that looked like it was in great condition.



Thanks for reading this really long post! I hope you enjoyed this blog entry as much as I did. I felt like I was in a "Modern Marvels" or "How It's Made" TV show. If you ever have the chance to tour a big sawmill like this, do it, but I suggest you take some hearing protection!
 
#27 ·
Georgia again - Sycamore Slabs!

I'm skipping some trips here, but I was in northwestern Georgia two weeks ago. I went out to visit my friends at the Cuzzort sawmill in Trenton, GA and came back with a nice pile of sycamore. It worked out to be about 50 bf. The piece was 3.5" thick, 14.5" wide and 10 feet long. That of course would be quite difficult to get on a plane, so after some quick calculations I had them resaw it to 2" and 1.5" and then we sawed it into three sections (44", 44", & 32"). Why so short? Well, with those dims I didn't have to pay any oversize/overweight checked bag fees. At a buck a board foot and no shipping costs…. This one was a pretty awesome deal.

So, believe it or not, all of this came back as checked baggage on the plane with me. Toting 180+ pounds of lumber through the airport is quite an exercise since it's a bit problematic to move it in multiple trips. TSA and airport police get antsy about stuff left lying around.


Here's the three "bags" shrink wrapped to protect the poor baggage handlers hands from splinters, etc.





Can't see much through the plastic? Here's the end grain…



OOOHHHH… spalting? Yup - have a look…




This stuff has been air drying for over a year. Normally I'd say it couldn't be even close to dry, but when we resawed it, I measured the moisture in the center of the inside cut and it was only about 14%. I'll let it dry up in my 100+ degree garage in Texas and it'll be "kiln" dried in no time. It's been a hot dry year. Guess there's a silver lining even when there are no clouds or rain.
 
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