Harvesting the Wood
Many customers ask, where does the wood come from and how do you harvest it? The majority of the wood that I use comes from a one hundred mile radius of my business in Whitsett, Tx. My dad and I go out and actually hunt for the Mesquite trees. We have traveled down many farm to market roads searching for these gorgeous trees. When we locate a tree or trees we try to figure out who the landowner is. That might take knocking on doors, calling real estate agents, looking for clues on gates....and so on. We have encountered some crazy and exciting moments by doing this. One thing I have learned is you just can't trust some peoples dogs. When we find the landowner we talk to him about the trees and explain to him or her that we would pay top dollar for their trees. We figure up the estimated board feet in the trees by using a formula called the Doyle's Log Scale. When we obtain the board feet figure we multiply it by a dollar amount. This dollar amount varies from tree to tree. On the bigger trees, that are higher yielding, the dollar amount would go up. Once we decide on a price, we line up a way to load the trees. Most of the time we call someone that is local in that particular area that has a backhoe, skid steer, tractor, etc and pay them for their services. Every now and then we have a gracious landowner that has a tractor. Now it is time to cut the tree down. We have a wide array of Stihl chainsaws that will cut up to 32 inches. Next we study the tree, especially the really straight and perfectly balance ones to see which way they will fall. We start cutting on the side of the tree that will be the direction of the fall. We cut roughly 1/3 of the way and then position the end of saw into the heart of tree to cut the heart out. This prevents the heart coming out of the tree when felling and remaining on the stump. After this is done we cut on the opposite side till we are all the way through. Once they fall, they are cut into straight sections and loaded on the trailer.