REDWOOD RESCUE: I have been lucky enough to have spent most of my life right smack in the middle of Redwood country on the coast in Northern California.  You sort of never lose the wow factor when going into the redwood forests.  The history of the logging of the trees began in the mid 1800s and continued up until about the 1970s when people started to realize the old growth trees, or what is left of them should be protected.  Most of the local forests were logged to build the city of San Francisco....twice.

Up until the 1970s you could find the true old growth lumber in virtually every lumber yard and back yard on the north coast.  Over the last thirty years is has all gone away.  All logging has virtually ground to a halt.  What you have on the market now is second growth redwood or farmed redwood.  Not even the same material and I won't use it.  There are some backyard mills cutting up old stumps that they have, but are  few and far between and horribly expensive.

What you are going to find below is my effort to preserve some of this old wood when I run into it.  Often I find it in piles from old fences or barns being torn down.  You can pick through a hundred boards and only find one or two that can be salvaged, worked,  and made into something.  You just can't get the old growth redwood in any type of quantity to produce something regular.  So what I do is look at a couple of boards I get here and there that I can salvage.  I then decide what will fit on them and what might go well with the individual grain and coloring of the natural wood and make something.  Mostly, these one of a kind pieces.