In October of 2011, I got a call from a home owner on the Burton Peninsula who told me he was taking down a madrone tree and wondered whether VFS would be interested in the logs. I asked him if they were big - at least 2 feet in diameter. He said yes.

When I arrived at the site the trees were over 4' in diameter. Too big and heavy for our log truck. We hired Al Bradley to transport the logs back to our mill yard. Too big for our mill we hired a Lucas chainsaw mill - a particularly wide portable mill capable of cutting logs up to 5 feet across.

We slabbed two large madrone logs into ten - 15' long x 4' wide x 4" thick slabs and stickered them out to air dry for a year per inch of thickness - four long years.

This October will be four years. The slabs will head to the kiln for further drying. Anyone ever seen a madrone board four feet wide?