THE Random Chat Thread - AKA "The RCT" - No shirt or shoes required - Open 24 / 7

Blak bart said:
My brother inlaw is a general contractor....I often borrow his machinery. Plenty of big machines at my disposal if needed. The one im working on now is a 5000 pounder.....not huge but not small either. When each slab is cut it can often take 5 men to move the big cuts.
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It's not that a set up can't cut the slab-it's the needed help to work the cuts.
A friend up the way has the ability to cut 30" with his mill-but hates working with the size because turning the cants is hard on the frame if it's dropped.

Oh Jimmy is still wanting a mill-but the big projects have to be finished up first. ( The sigh of the heavy heart)
 

Morning bill WD. bart and Rusty
 

Good morning WD, Bill and Bart. :hello:


Sounds like you've got a sweet arrangement with your brother-in-law for a steady supply of lumber to Bart. :thumbsup:
 

Lots of demand for used 20"+ planers up here, as large slabs are being cut for projects.

The top pine boards were 22"x2"x16'

Axles were complaining some what-then again I'm a use/abuse type of a guy when it comes to machinery/vehicles.

F6F20D73-AC02-4897-BA25-3D845F20E8DE_1_201_a.jpeg
 

Dave we are very blessed. When we started this log thing we had alot of doubters and haters.....that was then....now we have the support of this community 100%....people have come to our aid with tools, equipment, and logs like we never imagined. Most of my recent furniture builds are free giveaways that go to the folks who have helped us with so much generosity. We're green and eco friendly and people love that. We are developing a lost resource and each cuban mahogany is truly a local treasure. Never in my life have I had the support of so many in this community. We must get a big saw mill before I open the flood gates and have the tree cutters drop on our log lot. We will quickly be buried under a mountain of logs if we give the word to bring the wood. Working on an exclusive contract with shell lumber to by our mahogany.....if it goes as planned it will be a life changer for us.exciting times for our little hobby business. Im so blessed to have a great partner and be a part of this.....if im lucky we can develop something that can be passed along to my 8 year old son one day. He already knows more about logs than most adults do...lol !!
 

pepperj said:
Lots of demand for used 20"+ planers up here, as large slabs are being cut for projects.

The top pine boards were 22"x2"x16'

Axles were complaining some what-then again I'm a use/abuse type of a guy when it comes to machinery/vehicles.

View attachment 1883372
Click to expand...

Here's how we flatten the great big live edge slabs. i have a large flattening bit from infinity tools.....its a 2 inch cutter and our version of this set up is super sized. 100% flat and true after this process.....this process is a bit time consuming but the results are incredible.
 

It becomes so much more when I tell people that I personally knew the tree that there furniture came from when it was a living creature. Not many of the greatest furniture makers ever saw the tree that there wood came from. Thats what makes people love our work so much. I have a complete back story behind every piece of furniture....complete with adress and GPS coordinats, and a Google earth shot of where the tree grew....even the great Sam aloof couldn't say that about his furniture. Im preserving the soul of these trees in furniture pieces. Taking a tree and making a telecaster gutiar is just mind blowing to me !!
 

Here's a custom piece we had a shop make for us 20yrs ago. Curly maple
20201201_080242.jpg
 

Wow.....thats a masterpiece. Gorgeous!!
 

Blak bart said:
Dave we are very blessed. When we started this log thing we had alot of doubters and haters.....that was then....now we have the support of this community 100%....people have come to our aid with tools, equipment, and logs like we never imagined. Most of my recent furniture builds are free giveaways that go to the folks who have helped us with so much generosity. We're green and eco friendly and people love that. We are developing a lost resource and each cuban mahogany is truly a local treasure. Never in my life have I had the support of so many in this community. We must get a big saw mill before I open the flood gates and have the tree cutters drop on our log lot. We will quickly be buried under a mountain of logs if we give the word to bring the wood. Working on an exclusive contract with shell lumber to by our mahogany.....if it goes as planned it will be a life changer for us.exciting times for our little hobby business. Im so blessed to have a great partner and be a part of this.....if im lucky we can develop something that can be passed along to my 8 year old son one day. He already knows more about logs than most adults do...lol !!
Click to expand...

I thought you might find this 23 year old article of interest Bart. :thumbsup:


With Timber Scarce, Old Logs Deep in a Lake Become a Sunken Treasure - By Dirk Johnson
Sept. 24, 1997

Russet sunlight skips across Lake Superior, the last waltz of a fading summer, as a scuba diver 30 feet below the surface swims toward a pile of ancient oak logs. They are sunken remnants of the virgin forest, felled in a boom-time fury, then lost and forgotten for a century. ''Jackpot!'' exclaims the diver, Jeff Petrouski, 24, speaking to co-workers on the crew boat via radio, after the recent discovery of the lake-bed shelf of timber, cut years ago from an old forest and preserved by the cold. From the Civil War to World War I, when lumberjacks largely denuded the rugged North Woods of Wisconsin, logs were often stored in floating masses on Lake Superior, and many sank. Rather than retrieve the logs, it was cheaper and easier to cut down more trees. But now the scarcity of old timber, with its tight grain from slow growth, has made these logs sunken treasure. The Superior Water-Logged Lumber Company, headed by an underwater explorer who once made a living searching for shipwrecks, dries and mills the old timber, then sells it to furniture makers, artists and builders of stringed instruments. ''We've got a virgin forest at the bottom of the lake,'' said Scott Mitchen, the 39-year-old president of Water-Logged Lumber in this old port town, noting that millions of ancient logs could be recovered from the bottom of oceans, lakes and rivers around the world. ''Every tree we retrieve is a tree we don't have to cut down,'' Mr. Mitchen said. ''This is environmentally friendly logging.''

The United States Army Corps of Engineers and Wisconsin officials in June approved underwater logging in certain parts of Lake Superior. The Water-Logged company, which operates in a formerly abandoned sawmill it purchased for $1 from this job-starved town, has recently started using sonar to locate the underwater logs, which tend to be plentiful near the sites of long-vanished mills along the lakeshore. For now, divers attach eye bolts to the logs, which are pulled up individually, using galvanized wire, to a barge. The company expects to retrieve about 10,000 by the end of October when the water usually freezes. It has $7.5 million worth of orders for the old timber.

Starting next year, the company plans to use a crane on the barge to scoop up a large number of logs from the bottom at the same time. The aim is to pull up 20,000 to 30,000 logs in the warm months next year. The idea for the company came to Mr. Mitchen while he was exploring for shipwrecks in Lake Superior in the early '90s after he had seen countless logs in his dives. The abundance of old logs, together with rising timber prices, convinced Mr. Mitchen that a forgotten treasure was waiting in the water. The Water-Logged company pays Wisconsin one-third of the value of each log, based on the current market value of freshly cut timber. After a drying process that takes weeks, the old wood is cut and sold for much higher prices than new wood, sometimes 10 times as much. About a dozen kinds of trees are retrieved, including oak, maple, birch, elm, ash and pine. Birds-eye maple, with its iridescent grain, sells for as much as $80 a foot after being cut.

While most of the salvaged wood goes for furniture and craftwork, some has been used to make stringed instruments, like a flat-topped acoustic guitar the company is giving to the country singer Johnny Cash. The company's keenest hopes lie in finding wood for exquisite violins. A sample of 300-year-old maple has been analyzed by Joseph Nagyvary, a researcher and violin builder at Texas A&M University, who has compared it to the material used by Antonio Stradivari, who built the world's finest violins in the 17th and 18th centuries in Italy. ''I have not seen anything like this in modern times -- it's in the same ballpark as a Stradivarius,'' said Mr. Nagyvary, whose research has indicated that Stradivari soaked his wood in water, which removed gums and resins. So, it is possible that the lake water has cleansed the old wood in a similar way. But a guitar-builder who works for Water-Logged Lumber, Chris Hinton, said fewer than one in 1,000 old logs met the precise standards of size, weight and grain pattern required for such violins.

Terry Mace, a wood specialist for the state forestry department, said that, more than anything else, Water-Logged Lumber sold mystique. ''People feel good about holding something that is that old, that harkens back to history,'' Mr. Mace said. The nether reaches of Wisconsin were so heavily forested before 1870 that an early settler, Asaph Whittlesey, expressed fear that his wife would never be comfortable in a place where it was impossible to see the sky. While lumberjacks largely cleared Wisconsin of virgin forests, the state still harvests 4.2 million cords of wood a year, much of it for paper, and 99,000 people work in the forestry industry.

In the logging boom of the late 1800s, when the mills in Ashland alone cut 500 million board feet of lumber a year, enough for about 50,000 houses, timber barons built mansions and grand hotels, civic boosters promoted Ashland as ''the next Chicago,'' adventurous, hard-drinking men came to cut the trees and pack the saloons, and an enterprising Madison woman, Molly Cooper, became infamous for running the brothels that catered to them. Much of the lumber milled here was shipped south to rebuild Chicago after its fire in 1871. The tree limbs left behind by lumberjacks sometimes fueled terrible blazes in northern Wisconsin. Indeed, a fire in the North Woods killed 1,152 people in the town of Peshtigo, half the population, on the very same day the Chicago Fire killed 250.

The ghosts of those audacious times still lurk in the little towns of the North Woods, where gracious old houses are paint-chipped, their wraparound porches sagging because of the want of money for repairs. Here in Ashland, there is the Chequamegon Hotel, a grand dowager on the bay, with a bar named for Molly Cooper. Some of the timber towns, like Nash and Sioux, have disappeared. Much of the old forest was long ago transformed into dairy farms. While tourist money still flows into the port town of Bayfield, a charming old fishing village, the North Woods region is among the most economically depressed in Wisconsin.

Ashland, on Chequamegon Bay about 75 miles east of Duluth, had a population of more than 25,000 at the turn of the century. Today, it has a population of about 8,000. But the town has hopes that Water-Logged Lumber, which has drawn about 15,000 curious visitors to its mill in the past year, could put some spark into a community that is fighting hard for its successes, like the revitalized Old Depot, once a grand train station and now a restaurant, bar and museum.

Water-Logged Lumber, which employs about 30 people, got a subsidized loan of $400,000 from the Wisconsin Department of Economic Development. ''This is a region where life has never been easy,'' said Jan Young, a local historian. But those here stay for the beauty, the rolling hills thick with oaks, hemlock and tamarack; the pristine Apostle Islands, and the crashing waves of Lake Superior, the world's largest body of freshwater, and, residents insist, the cleanest. The retrieval of the old logs, in the view of Mr. Mitchen, gives people here a tangible connection to their roots and their history. ''Our kids in Wisconsin know a lot about shipwrecks and pirates, but they know very little about their own heritage,'' said Mr. Mitchen, a Milwaukee native, noting that most people in the North Woods traced back to loggers. ''This wood tells their story.''
 

Stories like that got us going and our biggest competition is greener logs in belize.....they are the only guys importing our wood.....the only way they are allowed to deal in this endangered species is to harvest the river bottom for the old sunken and hand felled mahogany. They are very successful and I considered going there and diving with them...but we found our niche right in our own backyard through urban logging !!
 

ANTIQUARIAN said:
I thought you might find this 23 year old article of interest Bart. :thumbsup:


With Timber Scarce, Old Logs Deep in a Lake Become a Sunken Treasure - By Dirk Johnson
Sept. 24, 1997

Russet sunlight skips across Lake Superior, the last waltz of a fading summer, as a scuba diver 30 feet below the surface swims toward a pile of ancient oak logs. They are sunken remnants of the virgin forest, felled in a boom-time fury, then lost and forgotten for a century. ''Jackpot!'' exclaims the diver, Jeff Petrouski, 24, speaking to co-workers on the crew boat via radio, after the recent discovery of the lake-bed shelf of timber, cut years ago from an old forest and preserved by the cold. From the Civil War to World War I, when lumberjacks largely denuded the rugged North Woods of Wisconsin, logs were often stored in floating masses on Lake Superior, and many sank. Rather than retrieve the logs, it was cheaper and easier to cut down more trees. But now the scarcity of old timber, with its tight grain from slow growth, has made these logs sunken treasure. The Superior Water-Logged Lumber Company, headed by an underwater explorer who once made a living searching for shipwrecks, dries and mills the old timber, then sells it to furniture makers, artists and builders of stringed instruments. ''We've got a virgin forest at the bottom of the lake,'' said Scott Mitchen, the 39-year-old president of Water-Logged Lumber in this old port town, noting that millions of ancient logs could be recovered from the bottom of oceans, lakes and rivers around the world. ''Every tree we retrieve is a tree we don't have to cut down,'' Mr. Mitchen said. ''This is environmentally friendly logging.''

The United States Army Corps of Engineers and Wisconsin officials in June approved underwater logging in certain parts of Lake Superior. The Water-Logged company, which operates in a formerly abandoned sawmill it purchased for $1 from this job-starved town, has recently started using sonar to locate the underwater logs, which tend to be plentiful near the sites of long-vanished mills along the lakeshore. For now, divers attach eye bolts to the logs, which are pulled up individually, using galvanized wire, to a barge. The company expects to retrieve about 10,000 by the end of October when the water usually freezes. It has $7.5 million worth of orders for the old timber.

Starting next year, the company plans to use a crane on the barge to scoop up a large number of logs from the bottom at the same time. The aim is to pull up 20,000 to 30,000 logs in the warm months next year. The idea for the company came to Mr. Mitchen while he was exploring for shipwrecks in Lake Superior in the early '90s after he had seen countless logs in his dives. The abundance of old logs, together with rising timber prices, convinced Mr. Mitchen that a forgotten treasure was waiting in the water. The Water-Logged company pays Wisconsin one-third of the value of each log, based on the current market value of freshly cut timber. After a drying process that takes weeks, the old wood is cut and sold for much higher prices than new wood, sometimes 10 times as much. About a dozen kinds of trees are retrieved, including oak, maple, birch, elm, ash and pine. Birds-eye maple, with its iridescent grain, sells for as much as $80 a foot after being cut.

While most of the salvaged wood goes for furniture and craftwork, some has been used to make stringed instruments, like a flat-topped acoustic guitar the company is giving to the country singer Johnny Cash. The company's keenest hopes lie in finding wood for exquisite violins. A sample of 300-year-old maple has been analyzed by Joseph Nagyvary, a researcher and violin builder at Texas A&M University, who has compared it to the material used by Antonio Stradivari, who built the world's finest violins in the 17th and 18th centuries in Italy. ''I have not seen anything like this in modern times -- it's in the same ballpark as a Stradivarius,'' said Mr. Nagyvary, whose research has indicated that Stradivari soaked his wood in water, which removed gums and resins. So, it is possible that the lake water has cleansed the old wood in a similar way. But a guitar-builder who works for Water-Logged Lumber, Chris Hinton, said fewer than one in 1,000 old logs met the precise standards of size, weight and grain pattern required for such violins.

Terry Mace, a wood specialist for the state forestry department, said that, more than anything else, Water-Logged Lumber sold mystique. ''People feel good about holding something that is that old, that harkens back to history,'' Mr. Mace said. The nether reaches of Wisconsin were so heavily forested before 1870 that an early settler, Asaph Whittlesey, expressed fear that his wife would never be comfortable in a place where it was impossible to see the sky. While lumberjacks largely cleared Wisconsin of virgin forests, the state still harvests 4.2 million cords of wood a year, much of it for paper, and 99,000 people work in the forestry industry.

In the logging boom of the late 1800s, when the mills in Ashland alone cut 500 million board feet of lumber a year, enough for about 50,000 houses, timber barons built mansions and grand hotels, civic boosters promoted Ashland as ''the next Chicago,'' adventurous, hard-drinking men came to cut the trees and pack the saloons, and an enterprising Madison woman, Molly Cooper, became infamous for running the brothels that catered to them. Much of the lumber milled here was shipped south to rebuild Chicago after its fire in 1871. The tree limbs left behind by lumberjacks sometimes fueled terrible blazes in northern Wisconsin. Indeed, a fire in the North Woods killed 1,152 people in the town of Peshtigo, half the population, on the very same day the Chicago Fire killed 250.

The ghosts of those audacious times still lurk in the little towns of the North Woods, where gracious old houses are paint-chipped, their wraparound porches sagging because of the want of money for repairs. Here in Ashland, there is the Chequamegon Hotel, a grand dowager on the bay, with a bar named for Molly Cooper. Some of the timber towns, like Nash and Sioux, have disappeared. Much of the old forest was long ago transformed into dairy farms. While tourist money still flows into the port town of Bayfield, a charming old fishing village, the North Woods region is among the most economically depressed in Wisconsin.

Ashland, on Chequamegon Bay about 75 miles east of Duluth, had a population of more than 25,000 at the turn of the century. Today, it has a population of about 8,000. But the town has hopes that Water-Logged Lumber, which has drawn about 15,000 curious visitors to its mill in the past year, could put some spark into a community that is fighting hard for its successes, like the revitalized Old Depot, once a grand train station and now a restaurant, bar and museum.

Water-Logged Lumber, which employs about 30 people, got a subsidized loan of $400,000 from the Wisconsin Department of Economic Development. ''This is a region where life has never been easy,'' said Jan Young, a local historian. But those here stay for the beauty, the rolling hills thick with oaks, hemlock and tamarack; the pristine Apostle Islands, and the crashing waves of Lake Superior, the world's largest body of freshwater, and, residents insist, the cleanest. The retrieval of the old logs, in the view of Mr. Mitchen, gives people here a tangible connection to their roots and their history. ''Our kids in Wisconsin know a lot about shipwrecks and pirates, but they know very little about their own heritage,'' said Mr. Mitchen, a Milwaukee native, noting that most people in the North Woods traced back to loggers. ''This wood tells their story.''
Click to expand...

There's a company that logs the Ottawa River- Logs End-"ethical logging practises" Less than ethical business practises when it comes to honouring their products and contracts.
Trust me when the Forest Gump saying comes out "RUN FOREST RUN"
 

Cool article about sunken logs in the Big Lake, but they forgot to mention that there are Red Birch logs down there. Red birch was logged into extinction. If you got some antique red birch furniture that needs repair, $2,000 a bd/ft is cheap.
 

pepperj said:
Might want to try these folks for pricing on the Red Birch wood
https://www.cherokeewood.com/store/red-birch-dimensional-lumber/
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Maybe it wasn't Red Birch, but pretty sure it was a birch I read about. As an aside, I'll bet that close to 90% of the "white oak" furniture sold in the United States is made from ash, not oak trees. A magnifying glass shows the difference in the grain.

Here's some old Mi lobbying BlackBart might find interesting - https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/1999-2000/billanalysis/House/htm/1999-HLA-5690-A.htm
 

Msbeepbeep said:
Come on back Boatlode!
And welcome to Nsdq, & Noah D, and Boatlode pull up a rum keg and have a seat.
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ANTIQUARIAN said:
Me thinks you need to restock the rum cupboard ARC... that way Boatlode might stick around. :laughing7:
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bill from lachine said:
Good afternoon boatload, RC, WD & WIF.
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AARC said:
Whats up Boatload... welcome to the RCT... your seat here is cold... and lonely... and your rum cup runneth over.
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Brrrrrrrrr! I had to push the dog outside this morning.
 

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