Locally grown timber
It’s probably worth expanding on where all of our timber comes from. We feel a moral responsibility to use locally sourced timber (within East Anglia; Suffolk, Norfolk & North Essex). Many of the trees are being thinnned out of managed woodlands.
Though there are most likely cheaper sources from mainland Europe and in the UK, this does simply not bode well with one of our principle ethical values – sustainability. Imported timber has very high embodied energy, mainly through transportation, and that’s not good! Obviously it’s impossible to be carbon neutral, but we try our best.
We can even take your trees and turn them into usable timber using our simple but effective ‘Alaskan’ chainsaw mill.
Most of our timber is Oak, some from managed woodlands, some from large estates and domestic locations; The trees have become too large, dangerous, diseased or just dead! 🙁
An Oak tree…
The timber is diced into manageable portions on site, then transported as butts and limbs back to the timber yard. It then may lay around for some time until a suitable order has come in to maximize it’s use.
Here’s a nice bit we looked at last week:
Quite often we select the timber which might be suitable for a certain job, such as a specific curve within a brace or collar, example:
Timber that comes from large European suppliers, or even UK suppliers can be devoid of character. This is generally because the timber is straight and clean with few ‘defects’.
Our timber varies in appearance and oozes character; knots, waney edges, bark etc are common features. Just look at any ancient timber frame building and you will see the knots and distortions that exist within naturally grown timber. Though if this is not what you expect, we take care in selecting the right trees for you.
There are times when it is necessary to conform to modern regulations, such as a specific spanning timber to be graded to a standard (e.g D40) therefore using graded timber may be unavoidable.
The above is a very large band saw, which is primarily how our timbers are cut to a square section. Curved timbers are cut from ‘slabbed’ material using a specialist saw at the workshop.