Quote:
Originally Posted by HemiEd
I had never heard it called "ice cream wood" before, interesting.
I am not sure if there is any of that hedge growing around here but we had plenty of it in Kansas. Doesn't it have this kind of screwy twisty grain that makes it hard to work with? My brother likes burning hedge because it burns so hot.
The mill a "couple hollars over" only does cedar and oak. I bought 40 1x8x8fts in white oak from them. Holy crap, that stuff is like titanium compared to the cedar.
There is a few more mills around here and I will have to check them out one of these days.
Thanks for your input.
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My buddy's dad has near 1000 acres now and a fire spread across a large portion of it. It killed a stand of walnut trees but didn't actually hurt the lumber. The insurance company still paid him for it. He took the money and bought a mobile saw mill and set it up at his old hey barn, then we cut down the walnuts that had died and he used the mill to re-saw them into rough cut lumber of all sizes.
Ended up using the lumber to build a big covered bridge (beautiful bridge; brilliant guy with a masters in math from MIT; designed/built the bridge himself). That sawmill has been a huge benefit for him.
As for the hedge...I don't recall much in the way of twisted grains but again, that mill made light work of just about anything we needed. Admittedly we didn't get a ton of lumber, but we got enough. And yeah, it burns hot as hell again because of the density and the amount of energy it has on account of it. As opposed to something like cottonwood that is soft, burns in a heartbeat and has no energy to speak of.
We used to take hedge down by piling around it and burning it because it was eating saw blades alive. Once we got some of the smaller stuff down and milled though, we convinced his dad to stop doing that and he's started saving it for later use. He's used it to build a 'deck' on the outside of the covered bridge that really couldn't have come out any better.