Got up this morning and, after some breakfast, set to work in my shop, mostly cleaning up and faffing about, when I heard some motor noises. First I thought, ah, somebody is clearing up the garden a bit. But it didn’t stop. After about 2 hours I want to have a look, and there was a tree surgery a few hundred yards down the road, cutting down a sizeable lime (linden/basswood) tree. So I started talking to the guys. Turns out they were hired by the council, as the tree was getting too big and also interfering with several telephone lines. According to the boss of the team, the wood was going into firewood.
By the time I got there, they had already taken all the branches off completely and were using a cherrypicker to lob off slices about 10 metres from the ground. After a short chat, I agreed with the bossman that when they got to the straight piece of the trunk, they would cut me a few rounds about the same height as the diameter. Once these were on the ground, they were so heavy that there was no way to get them into the car in one piece, so I agreed to pay them £20 to cut them in half (through the pith). Even then, each piece is still about 50kg in weight (obviously full of water). The trunk diameter is about 2ft, but the biggest diameter bowl blank I can get is only about 18″, because otherwise the pieces would have been too heavy to shove them off the tree after cutting. Still, a very nice size.
So now I have a boot full of lime, waiting to be cut into pieces and sealed, all in all about 300kg. Not bad for a Sunday morning.
If anybody is interested, I would be more than happy to cut blanks to required sizes for a small fee.