Axe men

[Woodworks]

Just been watching this and wondered if anyone knows why the logs that come out the river are so valuable? They did not look like anything special when they cut one open but kept going on about the wood being "cured". Of course it could all be male cow dung put on for TV

[54gka]

Yeah i watched that did i hear him say something about the crystals or something in the wood.I think its repeated later in the week so I'm going to have to watch it again

[spudulike]

It is to do with the unique colouration of the wood being submerged in water for so long!

 

Those two are comical:thumbup:

[treequip]

Just been watching this and wondered if anyone knows why the logs that come out the river are so valuable? They did not look like anything special when they cut one open but kept going on about the wood being "cured". Of course it could all be male cow dung put on for TV

 

Nail - Head:laugh1:

[Stubby]

In one of the very early episodes a few years back ( when it was not sooo obviously staged ) one of the swamp/river loggers pulled a huge stick out and said it would be worth a fortune . They went on to follow it to the saw mill. Someone building a new house bought it and it showed all the parts being madfe from the log to go into the new house most of which comprised of the mantel around the fire place . It looked beautiful when finished I must admit .

[Sandworks]

I Suspect it is clever marketing….it is a finite resource so therefore has some value plus a good story to bs people with….like bog oak ect… have to admit having seen some furniture it looks amazing…. but some logs pulled up are huge and great timberin their own right…. better watch than all the soaps anyway!

[MattyF]

The timber is all old growth so has tighter rings and much sought after by craftsmen I've heard is another reason.

 

 

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[Mike Dempsey]

I used to watch The New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abrams a few years ago on the Discovery Channel. In several episodes he has been with a company that had divers search for these old pine logs and they were quite successful in recovering them from the bottom of rivers and lakes. The were from the old days when they used to have a sawmill several miles downstream and the logs on the hillside were put into chutes and dumped in the river. They were all tied together and floated down to the sawmill. Some of them would escape and end up on the bottom to be rescued 100 plus years later.

Compared to todays logs the old grown trees were a lot denser and the rings were so close together it was hard to count them.

Was the timber any better? Due to the fact they were pine, which is obviously a softish wood, you would have thought there wouldn't be much difference but there was. It was harder to work and quite nice figuring due to the tighter rings. The sap in the timber was also replaced by the water in the lake which made it a bit trickier to season properly (bit like bog oak) The real value in the timber was due to the marketing of using old growth timber and the fact that it was salvaged from the bottom of the lake where it had lain for over 100 years undisturbed. The costs of recovering it using divers, boats and cranes etc would certainly make it more expensive than the usual felling a tree and carting it off to the sawmill!

[bella wood]

I think it's an american thing ,, look at the prices at urbanhardwoods.com as they seem to bumpf there stuff up,, i must have millions of pounds worth of timber here goin on the prices there wantin for very basic stuff

[wyk]

It's real value, aside from making hippies feel less guilty, is not in how tight the rings may be(there is plenty of new growth with tight rings about for furniture), and even less to do with the structural quality of the wood(new growth Douglas Fir, the wood used mostly in construction in the states, is as strong, or stronger than old growth, and dirt cheap and plentiful from renewable tree farms throughout the PNW). The most expensive wood is treasured for it's figuring. When you stuff a log into river water, where it will see water current for the rest of it's 'life', sediment and minerals will wash over and be absorbed into the fibers and gaps. The lack of oxygen, especially in hotter southern climes, helps preserve the wood. The last recovered trunk I cut was a Douglas Fir, about 4' wide by 80' in length that had bright warm red, orange, and purple grain throughout. Since Douglas Fir can also be structural, this added a bit to the value of that log since much of it became an open stairwell.