Well I was going to post some pics but that's a tough act to follow... I made all this stuff from some logs I had kicking around.
I had a guy one time who wanted to carve out a dragon and asked if I had some Basswood. Do I ever, so I cut a massive Basswood Tree down and even cut the tree to his exact specifications so that he could carve it and put it all together. I am not really artsy in nature, but do not condemn those that are, so I did all this for free. But he never showed up for the wood. I can't remember what happened to the wood now, but they were big beams that are no longer here. Kind of a shame. I would have never cut the tree if he had not wanted it. I was told maybe I should have charged for it, or had a deposit put upon it so that he had something invested and was more likely to show up. I just dislike waste. I am not perfect at 100% utilization either, but a massive basswood tree for nothing kind of irks me to this day.
Not a single tree, but I built this 30 x 48 barn two years ago with (15) big hemlocks. I had the wood custom sawn and they guy said he would come back any time as I had big trees. He did not know the half of it, I did not have a skidder at the time and could not get my biggest trees out of the woods. Some are over 4 feet in diameter.
I will post a picture of some of the Eastern Hemlocks I have that are just like the 15 that went into the making of this barn. It comes with a disclaimer, though. I do not just walk around in the woods taking photos of trees, so a few years ago my wife and I did a photo shoot of her as Little Red Ridinghood. I don't think it will offend anyone as she is dressed in costume, but with her sitting beside one of these hemlocks (this one is still standing as well as those around it) you get a sense of scale. The short of it is this; you can get a lot of 2x4's from one of these trees!
BTW: Just for people's information, at the top of the photo, about a 1/4 of the way into the tree, you will see a seam in the bark kind of like a white line. When you see a seam like that in Eastern Hemlock it is indicative of "black Heart", also known as rot, so you can see what is going on inside a tree if you know what to look for. As a general rule, Black Heart clears up after only a few feet, so I can be assured I will have to cut 4-6 feet off this tree after felling it to get to solid wood. Interestingly enough, this area of my forest does not have shake in the Hemlock. Most of the time big Hemlock's do, and Shake almost never clears up. From the bottom to thetop of the tree, shake exists making the tree unusable for lumber. Without question, Hemlock is one of my beloved tree species, and it should; it encompasses 28% of my forest!
