As promised, I'll post a bit about selecting and converting oak by hand, using only hand tools once the stem is cut into lengths. You'll have to bear with me, as I can only post during coffee breaks, so it'll be chopped into sections.
I live in an area of Jutland which has some amazing oak trees that grow as straight as telegraph poles. The species is
Quercus petraea otherwise known as the sessile oak. This grows in abundance in Europe and the British Isles and is sold, once converted as European oak and is easily mixed up with
Quercus robur, the English oak or pendunculate oak.
The way to tell the difference between the two trees is to look at the acorn. Pendunculate oaks' acorn grows on a stalk and sessile oaks' acorn doesn't. The other distinguishing characteristic of sessile oak is its straight growth habit.
Sessile oak, also known as Baltic oak in the 17th. century was imported into the port of London in huge quantities after The Great Fire and can be seen in the magnificent interior joinery and paneled halls of the period.
Baltic oak was also used to make furniture and its straight growth, free of defects, lends itself to being split and converted from stems into panels and other furniture components.
I have the fortune to know a tame forester, who looks after an estate which has been cultivating oak and beech for several hundred years, and regularly has timber lots for sale when they harvest during the winter.
Last year they had a sale and I was lucky enough to be he first one to view the lot before it was shipped off the China to be made into Ikea laminate flooring
(I don't normally use emojis, but that called for one).
It was a decent lot and looked like this......
You can see a "V" chopped into the butt and that's my mark, so that the haulier knows which ones to take when he comes to collect.
I had a very strict selection process and managed to find 7 good ones from the lot. I chose only those which had straight splits in the butt, no twist, no epicormic growth (small shoots from the stem which make the cats paw pattern in sawn oak boards) and no bumps or lumps from earlier trimming of branches.
Delivery day came and they were dropped over the hedge into the garden. I had to chop them in half to get them into the garden, as they were 11M long and took up too much space.
Although there's an obvious large branch on the one in the foreground, the stem between the branches was beautiful and straight and it came at a great price because of it.
More later........
