During the last two weeks of May, we joined with the brawn and brains of Angel City Lumber for our quadrennial slabbing session. These two urban foresters are the force behind a burgeoning sustainable lumber operation that collaborates with the municipality and private landowners to keep fallen trees from the landfill or the wood chipper and instead transform them into beautiful dimensional lumber, wood slabs, and millworks. In a fortnight, they, with some assistance from their 60” Lucas Mill slabber and forklift, sliced up and stacked around 25,000 lbs of green wood, most notably our monster Coastal Live Oak log.
This beast, approximately the size of a Toyota 4Runner, had been parked beside our building since it was cut in Altadena last Spring, and we were delighted to finally take a look inside (and regain The Beef’s parking spot). Needless to say, the wood was veritable ham fudge, spalted as Stilton and full of beautiful figuring and color.
This, along with an Echo Park beech and some NoHo walnut, is now stickered and stacked deep in the bowels of our new slab storage annex, ready to spend several years basking in the uniquely desiccative Angeleno climate. While the Lumber Jocks made sawdust, Thomas (aka Tony) outfitted the space with some serious vertical integration in the form of two 12’ cantilever storage racks, enough storage for the majority of our cured slab collection.
The team went to work and filled that space to capacity, breaking several sweats but thankfully nothing else of significance. With a cleared out back room, big changes are afoot for the OWS space, so stay posted for the remodel!