Earlier this week, with the assistance of my brother in law I retrieved a 24,000 lb red oak log from the Blandwood Mansion and Museum in Greensboro, NC.
Blandwood, a National Historical Landmark and also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, dates back to the late 1700's and was the ancestral home of Governor John M. Morehead, a highly regarded NC Governor and Philanthropist. A massive oak tree on the grounds had recently split and was starting to rot inside, and the museum staff and director made the hard decision to remove the tree before it started to fall down on it's own. They did not want to see the remnants go to a landfill though (and who can blame them?!).
For me, this project started several weeks ago when I was contacted by Erich Thompson, a woodworker and preservationist local to Greensboro who went to extraordinary lengths to personally arrange for the wood from the tree to be treecycled. Much of the upper canopy sections of the tree were harvested for local bowl turners, and Erich contacted me about reclaiming the main trunk into lumber.
All in all I ended up making three trips to try to retrieve the log. The first trip was last Monday; I arrived with a crew only to discover that the log was not accessible for parbuckling due to a plethora of the tree canopy logs that still surrounded it. Trip 2 was Monday of this week. In this instance we were able to set up and start parbuckling, but unfortunately my ramps decided to bend into banana's under the weight of that massive log. Monday night it was back to the drawing board to fabricate a new set of ramps from 12" I-beams with the addition of some mid-span supports that could rest on blocking.
Eureka! Tuesday's attempt to load the log was successful, albeit slow. It took Kevin and I eight hours to load this massive log onto a trailer using only a winch, multiple snatch blocks, come-a-longs, ramps and a 20 ton hydraulic bottle jack. The following day I was quite surprised to see an article in the Wednesday Greensboro New's and Record about our retrieval, with Kevin and my photos appearing in the paper loading the log.
Sometime in April I plan on milling the massive log into a mix of full width live edge slabs and wide quartersawn planks.
Here are a couple of photo's of Kevin and I loading the log: All in all a fun project!
Scott
The Greensboro News and Record had a nice writeup about the tree's history and our efforts to treecycle it:
