Popular Woodworking 2000-02 № 113, страница 63

Wood Types

Buying Submerged Lumber

Greg Sveinsson with a log recovered from the Great Lakes. Submerged timber is prized for its tight grain and annular rings.

Home woodworkers can now purchase old-growth lumber cut from logs discovered in the watery depths of the Great Lakes.

By Gregory Crofton

In the cold waters of the Great Lakes, treasure hunters and commercial divers considered them a nuisance. Huge logs stuck in the mud, suspended underwater or resting on the bottom were everywhere. But before long, the divers realized what they had once cursed was indeed a sunken treasure of a different kind.

They had discovered logs of red oak, yellow birch, white pine and maple that were lost between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s while the wood was en route to lumber mills. It turns out, the quality of this waterlogged wood was actually enhanced during its long stay underwater because much of the resin had leached out.

Today, sonar equipment, mechanical log loaders and polypropylene rope help to salvage the logs from the water. As this virgin timber is reclaimed from the water, many woodworkers are now able to buy this wood with its tight annular rings (sometimes as many as 77 per inch) and grain structure directly from salvage companies.

"When we bring a log up, it's kind of completing what these guys had started to do over 150 years ago," says Greg Sveins-son, co-owner of Timber Reclamation International, a business in Ashland, Wis. The company, founded in 1998, locates submerged wood, saws it and sells it. "One area in the Great Lakes where a team of horses ... went through the ice with a load of logs ... the skeletal remains of the horse are still there, harness, logs and all."

Hardwoods sink much faster than softwoods, so loggers made rafts out of pine to transport them. But often these rafts would break up going over a waterfall or get caught in a lake storm and the logs would be lost. Even back in the 1800s, hardwood was very valuable. Most of the wood that

sank as deep as 20 feet was recovered by loggers with piking poles. They would stab into the water, screw the end of the pole into a log and pull it to the surface.

"(Logs) all weigh more than water," says Chris Pilot, co-owner of TRI. "The only reason they are floating is because they have some air trapped in their cellular structure." Hardwoods such as red oak have a more open cellular structure than softwoods, so they absorb more water and sink much faster.

Log salvagers consider themselves lucky if they find any hardwood underwater, but a good place to start looking is near old mill

sites. TRI uses sonar equipment costing $34,000 to pinpoint the location of the logs. The sonar buoy is towed behind a boat and a cable attached to it sends information back to a computer kept on board. "You can actually measure the logs with the computer, so I can tell how long ... and how thick they are," Sveinsson says. Once he locates the wood, he'll swim to it and identify the species.

But TRI doesn't pull the logs out of the water. It only helps other salvagers find the wood. "We prefer not to recover them ourselves," Pilot says. "We prefer to teach peo-

Continued on page lb

10 Popular Woodworking February 2000