Visit to the WW's Candy Store

Ryan Mooney

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Just got back from a short trip down to visit some family on in SW Oregon. One of my cousins down there deals in specialty woods when he's not to busy logging (which has been surprisingly good the last couple of years) so I stopped in and picked up a few nice pieces of wood from him on the way through and snagged a couple pictures of his drool worthy shop to share :D Was lots of fun poking around in there with him and looking at some of the neat burls, slabs and nifty little bits of this and that he's collected.

I ended up getting some nice 8/4 hunks of curly maple destined to be parts of bed posts (which means I'm rapidly running out of excuses for that not being done :eek: its only been 4 years), a handful of myrtle and spalted maple turning squares, a few chunks of pistachio wood that were originally destined to be fret boards (a couple of guitar makers had high graded him a bit so I took some less than perfect pieces off of the stack that will end up as kitchen ware) and one cute little slab of olive wood (he has some HUGE slabs of olive but its such a painful wood to work I'm not sure what the heck you'd do with them).

Cute little 50hp 3phase woodmizer mill, he's modified it a bit to make it easier to cut some of the pieces he wants with the controls off to the side and the pinchers are more easily adjustable in height (for edging and re-sawing). Hidden behind that is the homemade lathe with a ~30" swing (plans to modify it to allow full to floor swing with a rail for the tailstock), the big old kiln on the left (which sounds like a pain to use) a 24" bandsaw and a big old 16" RAS.
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Stacks of mostly curly maple and myrtle wood (lots of guitar, ukelele blanks). I could spend a week digging through all that. This isn't counting the pallets of stuff under tarps outside :eek: Half hidden on the upper tier is a partially re-furbished 2 head 24" drum sander.. He only has a 1.5HP Delta DC hooked up (to the planer) at the moment so I'm thinking that might well be a problem.
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The forklift has my maple chunks on the pallet :woot: Behind that is the big Lucas Mill dedicated slabber (its basically a rather terrifying looking 8' long chainsaw with a right angle head on runners) and more slabs of redwood, myrtle, maple, spalted alder which seemed harder and less red than most of the alder I've worked so I think its a different sub species.. I snagged a small bowl blank of the alder but I think it might have split so we'll have to see if I can salvage it or not. I think we spent over an hour digging through the slabs back there, got a fair bit of interesting information on how they are picking out how to saw some of them.
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I'd intended to get some better pictures of some of the more interesting tools, but my phone chose this trip to go terminal so I had to borrow lomls right at the end of the day and was running out of time.
 
Question: Does your cousin do any hobby woodworking such as furniture, lathe work? Or is it just (ha ha) a source of income?

Some, he made a pretty nifty bowl lathe that he's done a bunch of bowls on and he's made a bunch of stuff around the house. He had one tree he found that was basically a whole burl that he had cut into veneer and bookmatched the entire floor to ceiling of their bedroom with it (since the grain is continuous in all directions its literally like standing inside of a huge tree burl) - most amazing thing I've seen in a long time.

He was doing more during the slump since there wasn't a lot of other work going on. Lately he's been mostly too busy with business to get a lot done though, last couple of years the logging has been real good again so even the specialty wood (which he enjoys more) has taken a bit of a back seat (that and there is a bit of a house remodel being done so that's sort of taking front row until he gets the master bathroom installed as promised 20 some years ago when they bought the house :doh: no stones thrown from this direction :rofl:).

One could also argue that some of the cutting and neat pieces of wood is somewhat of a hobby in and of itself, I'm sure others here other than me have been guilty of that :rolleyes:

Amusing side story a few years back we were visiting the same cousin and he was handling an estate sale of a fellow who had a hobby sawmill for 20+ years and have never sold a single stick of wood. So there were these huge slabs of 8/4 and thicker maple (and other stuff I'm sure) air dried for 10-15 years or even longer. Off to one side was a large pile of the "trash" wood that was going to the burn pile. I noticed a bunch of smaller burl slabs in it that didn't look to bad and said "honey back up the rig" and proceeded to mostly fill the SUV with scraps. This wasn't hugely popular as we were at about day 3 of a two week vacation and spent the rest of the trip avoiding the wood in the back of the car :D
I got the piece I used for the teapot stand out of one of those burl pieces (and still have a few others left): http://familywoodworking.org/forums/showthread.php?32026-Teapot-stand&highlight=

Hmmm...not to far from Oregon and some OT on the work schedule...may see you soon!

Wouldn't get in to big of a hurry Jim - he's out on the coast and I was taking detours and avoiding washed out roads all the way back over to the Willamette Valley, made for a long day. They really got some rain down there and we landed right in the middle of it. On the flip side there is this amazing liquor store right on the California side of the border... :D
 
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Wouldn't get in to big of a hurry Jim - he's out on the coast and I was taking detours and avoiding washed out roads all the way back over to the Willamette Valley, made for a long day. They really got some rain down there and we landed right in the middle of it. On the flip side there is this amazing liquor store right on the California side of the border... :D


Hmm, I could see a road trip though....
 
Better take both trucks!

He mostly like to sell pallets worth so that sounds like a good idea :D.

You know your shop size is just about right when you can use a Hi-Lo in it...:D Thanks for opening the door a tad :thumb:

I know right! I think I paced it out to be something like 60x90 and it's tall to. If you can drive a full sized stroker through the door to drop off a log you're doing something right. Personally I'd have it laid out a little differently but that's just the details.
 
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