Thursday, May 6, 2010

The Woodyard part 2

The Wood yard is HUGE - once you have signed in at reception, they assign you someone to take you round to find your wood and help you choose it. There are thousands of piles of wood in hundreds of varieties - and it is only hardwood as they don't sell softwood!!
He goes off and fetches our log of wood in this special side loading fork lift machine thingy (technical term LOL), and then places it on the ground in the wood yard outside.

Each plank is then carefully sorted through, the good ones are kept, and the bad ones are discarded. Its a bit like sorting through a fleece. We just take what we want, rather than buying the whole tree.
We took DS with us this time and DH introduced him to the mysteries of the grain and density of the wood. DH and the wood yard man had deep discussions about the merits of each plank, which made me very confused as it all looked the same to me, but they seemed to understand it all!!
Apparently good wood has a well defined grain, with the rings close together. This means it is very strong.

So we left with about 60 cubic feet of wood to make lots of lovely swifts and nostepinnes, and I was happy to collapse in a pub in the afternoon and relax.
Of course, when the wood is delivered, we have to spend 3 days cutting it into blocks, but I don't have to think about that just now : )







5 comments:

Once A Sheep said...

Fascinating to see the process from the start. Will you show us the swifts in construction too? (Might be fun to show my customers "their" swift being made:)

fibreclaireUK said...

Can do - I didnt think anyone would be interested in bits of wood and machinery.

Freyalyn said...

Fascinating! Who knew the ins and outs of woodyards, unless you actually visited one regularly. And I'm particularly pleased to learn the correct term for a side fork lift truck thingy.

fibreclaireUK said...

Yes, I felt particulary smug at my grasp of the correct terminology!!

ROFLOL

Stasher said...

Wood (sic) be nice if we could have a smell and feel via blogs! Then we would be able to smell all the flowers, and baking blogs too! Thanks for sharing this.