Sawkill Lumber

COOLING TOWER REDWOOD

Often times you need to understand the structure in order to understand the
wood. In the case of a cooling tower, the purpose of the structure is to
cool the water vapor so it will condense and can once again be converted to
steam to power the turbines. The structure is designed to have as much
surface area as possible so that more water will condense. The structure is
extremely wood intensive and yet the pieces are all rather small for such a
large structure. I had never before seen a wood structure five stories tall
with the largest wood member a nominal 4×4. Another first was the copper
fasteners – every nail, screw, bolt and nut was copper. Iron is cheaper but
rusts out and with all the water condensing would fail relatively quickly.
The result is a copper green patina on every single piece of this wood.
Cracking good.

Sizes: primarily 4/4 with some 5/4, 6/4 and 8/4. Primarily 4-9″ wide and
8-12′ long.
Applications: ideal for flooring, as well as all other interior
applications.
Grade: character grade, sound tight knot. No nail holes, very limited
checking.
Defining characteristic: unusual coloration from being under water so long
Milling and texture options: planed surface Grain density: about average for
heart pine, not loose but not especially tight either.

Carbon Footprints

| Featured, Uncategorized

Re-using any thing – the back side of scrap paper, buying a vintage shirt, installing deconstructed cabinetry – can seem an environmental no-brainer. And just the same, why cut down a good tree when there’s ready-made lumber from a felled building down the street?

The benefits seem even clearer with other raw materials. Scrap iron, for instance, requires just a third of the energy to recycle as virgin ore fed into a blast furnace to make new steel. The energy factors look flipped on the farm as well, where energy used to make food is all but a small percentage of overall fuel needs.

Scrap lumber and new logs are run through similar sawmill process’, even if the scale of operation is different. And demolition and forest logging look comparable on an energy count. And trees, of course are renewable. So new and used lumber on look to part ways from a carbon standpoint when the truck leaves the sawmill – aside, of course from the issue of having felled a new tree and sent an old one to the landfill.

Are sustainably harvested logs better or worse for the environment than salvaged lumber trucked or shipped from a far off region? A carbon footprint analysis should yield some rough idea, but no matter the relative measure, they both seem preferable than the wood coming out of the big box stores. Home Depot, Lowe’s, Ikea and Walmart all acknowledge that they are not yet able to track the wood sourced from over 80% of their Far East suppliers; an astonishing volume considering how much illegal timber is known to be flowing across the Russian border and out of Indonesia.

But reclaimed wood products, often priced 50% higher (at least) than new lumber, force many to justify that value on more than environmental grounds. Fortunately, reclaimed woods go well beyond the carbon footprint factors, being crafted by nature like the finest hand made shoes. The material maintains it’s value over time, trading on a mix of real world and esoteric qualities that combine quality, design (richer grain figure, color, character marks, etc) sustainability and the allure of history, into materials we can feel good about.

The Locavore’s Dilemma

| Featured

The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet, by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu attempts to debunk the most heartfelt beliefs of the local food movement. The counter arguing tone gets a kick-start in the introduction by an actual Missouri industrial farmer, and then goes on to take academic pot shots at the far left and agri-intellectuals, which, depending on the case, or relative position on the political/philosophical spectrum, are alternatively benign, counter-productive or outright dangerous.

They target foodies and urbanites that get a fix from the agrarian charms and tastes of farmer’s markets, heirloom varieties and organic produce; and the far left, often the low hanging fruit in assuming self-righteous anarchist opposition to industrial farming and globalization (a different kind of critique than the antics of Portlandia); and in the process, dismissing or underestimating the real virtues and intangibles that may amount to simply a more elevated form of eating – no small part of society – in the future. Or that local food production may still be at the beginning of a long trajectory. By contrast, Desrochers and Shimizu celebrate free markets and the global food chain – an evolving system that has nearly abolished hunger, improved food safety ten-fold, and delivered a bewildering variety of meat and produce to the local supermarket. But the argument seems out of balance, nearly as hard line as those being targeted (even if they’re just trying to make a point – or worse, goaded by the publisher to pick a fight) – that the potential for the best of both worlds seems lost.

Which side of the argument, or in what degree, local v. global develops is hard to know. The reviews are divisive. A lumber company blog isn’t the place for an analysis of the food safety, economics and environmental issues swirling within the complex world of local food. Maybe just how the analysis translates to “local lumber”.