Thursday, May 08, 2008

Need old redwood

From: "Judy Ashby" judybug2@verizon.net

In Carbondale, Illinois, we are working to restore the one geodesic dome in which R. Buckminster Fuller and his wife actually lived. One componenet of this restoration project is repair of the redwood fence; Bucky's unique design to maintain privacy while allowing air flow. In order to retain national historical monumnent status, we must use aged redwood like the original as much as possible.

Some early railroad water towers were made of redwood. In fact, we were able to obtain some wood from just such a tower, but we need more. Does anyone know of an existing redwood water tower, upright or fallen, that we could access for wood to continue restoration of Bucky's fence?

Thank you for any help.

Judy
Bucky Board Member

Judy Ashby, MS, LCPC
Executive Director
LifeSavers Training Corp.
LifeSavers = a peer-support, suicide and crisis-prevention program for high schools.
618-549-5578
www.lifesaverstraining.org

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." Jimi Hendrix

3 Comments:

Blogger CPRR Discussion Group said...

From: wem@onetel.com

There was a small sawmill in the Guerneville, California area a few years back, doing custom cutting of old-growth redwood, including old-growth heart redwood. Also, many of the older mills in northwestern California have discovered the value of pulling very old "sinkers" our of their millponds and milling them. I'd recommend a search of the net and contacting some of these mills. I'd rather see you take that direction than to sacrifice an historic structure for its lumber.

Cheers,
John Snyder
P.S. Preservation Services

5/08/2008 7:38 PM  
Blogger CPRR Discussion Group said...

From: "RANDALL HEES" hees@astound.net

From your message it is not clear if you are looking for old redwood because of its quality or because of the patina of age or trying to save money...

There are several mills in California able to cut good quality redwood. My favorite is Sturgeon's Mill, itself a preservation project.

We generally use redwoodlumberco.com for the redwood siding for our railroad car restorations.

Additionally big-creek.com has a good reputation, both for lumber and forestry practices.

Redwood was commonly used for larger wine tanks as well, and lumber companies specialzing in salvage and reselling such lumber, for example, heritagesalvage.com.

Randy Hees
Society for the Preservation of Carter Railroad Resouces

5/08/2008 7:46 PM  
Blogger CPRR Discussion Group said...

Thank you very much ... for your information and great resources. I'm sure this will help us.

—Judy

5/09/2008 11:13 PM  

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