On Friday I went out to Hearne Hardwoods, which is a wood supplier/sawmill about 1.5 hours from Hereford. I have been out there before to get some Port Orford cedar and Spanish Cedar for ukulele building. (Spanish Cedar is not from Spain, and is not a cedar, it is a light mahogany-type wood from central America.) Hearne imports logs from all over the world, and has a huge selection of domestic and imported woods. Want a slab of Bubinga that is 4 feet across, 20 feet long, and 3 inches thick? … just the place. This is a real wood geeks fantasy.
To cut the logs they import (from about 20 countries) they have a huge old bandsaw, that used to be at the Philadelphia Navy Yard cutting wood for battleship and aircraft carrier decks. The saw was patented in 1904. It can cut a 67 inch tall slice, the blade is 6 inches wide, and some 18 feet long. Anyway, they were having their open house days, and I went out to see the mill working, and of course, to browse the cheap cut-off bins. (Got some really nice, perfectly quartersawn, ukulele sized black walnut for $1 a pound, as well as some nice quilted maple and figured sapele off-cuts.) For the demo they were cutting a big local black walnut tree. (Note – black walnut, when it is fresh cut, is kind of greenish. It does not develop the usual walnut purple-brown color until is ages and dries out a bit.)
The slab is cut off, lowered to the out feed bed, and then picked up with a suction attachment on an overhead crane. That is a heavy piece of wood!
Want some nice big-leaf maple burl? How about a whole tree’s worth?
An English brown oak burl, cut at Hearne, made into a table by Mira Nakashima, surrounded by Nakashima chairs in East Indian rosewood.
The founder of Hearns’s favorite wood is Hawaiian Koa. Here is his desk, a giant koa slab. Notice that the floor is also koa, and that is not veneer!
The mill
Coming off you hold the cut slab tight up against the log until the cut is finished, then …
the slab gets lowered onto the out-feed table.
The slab gets picked up with a suction head on an overhead crane.
Stack of 2 inch thick walnut slabs.
