Why Milling Timber Doesn’t Always Go to Plan…

As you know here at Whitwell Sawmill we specialise in English timber with low mileage. All the wood we are milling has been grown in natural conditions, and has not been farmed for felling. A lot of this beautiful timber goes for firewood which is such a waste so we are delighted to be able to ensure this is being put to much better use.

However just like everything in life it doesn’t always go to plan. This soon became apparent most recently with a large Yew log we began to mill. This log had been taken down in our customer’s garden and they contacted us to see if we would be able to mill it with the view of making it into some furniture. On the surface it looked like it was going to make quite some number of striking useable planks so our customers had it transported to our site ready for milling.

Now at this point I think it’s worth mentioning that every log we buy is a bit of a gamble! Obviously we can only see the outside and we have to make an educated guess as to whether it will produce high quality timber. On this occasion we certainly weren’t expecting to being milling this Yew only to find it had the biggest ants nest you could ever imagine inside. It had basically taken out the entire middle of the log and the timber crumbled away before our eyes whilst 20 million ants swarmed out into the wood yard.

At this stage we were able to still get a few planks to go into the kiln, but definitely not the number we were hoping for. Sadly having later removed the planked timber from the kiln we found that the damage had already been done and the ants had pretty much destroyed the whole tree leaving us with only a small amount of usable wood for our customer.

This is the first time I have ever come across ants causing so much damage! We have previously milled some timber and discovered a bullet in the tree which will have been there for many a year. That was quite the find and we wish we knew the full story!  I have also heard of an entire piston being found inside a tree. Each tree certainly has a history of its own. Whilst on this occasion we were only able to save a small about of Yew, it will no doubt become a talking piece in our customers home.