The Tan Oak came back with a vengence.

Ben Said:
"Redwood Forest Foundation (RFFI) is looking for ideas on how to remove tanoak and have the trees pay for the removal. They have 50,000 acres from Piercy/Legget to the coast. Any ideas?"



Ben as you know, the forest/timber industry considers the Tan Oak to be a weed. Back in the sixties and seventies, Mal Coombs spent a lot of big bucks hoping to find a use for Tan Oak. He had thousands of acres of them choking out Redwood and Fir trees. He brought many of the oak logs into his mill and experimented with them. He already had a steam powered drying kiln for the kiln-dried Redwood products that he sold. He did a lot of experimenting in drying the lumber for high quality furniture. The tan wood proved to be too unstable for furniture. I think that people nowadays would be glad to have it. We have forgotten what quality is.

He developed a baseball bat out of the Tan Oak. There was something wrong with the wood where it wasn’t strong enough, or something like that. I’m not sure what was wrong with the wood, but they even made a bat that was laminated with fiberglass to make a wood quality bat, but it was not approved by the baseball industry. I think that he was just not one of the baseball “good old boys”.

After the bat thing failed, they tried to manufacture various small board flooring options. The only flooring that Mal would approve of, that he would put his name on, was the small wood pieced Parquet flooring. The flooring was beautiful, but it was not as successful as a product as he had hoped it would be.

An interesting story: When Mal was just going into full production with the Tan Oak flooring, the Humboldt County Airport in McKinleyville was just being built, and Mal negotiated a deal with the county to put his Tan Oak Parquet Flooring in the main terminal. Somehow a piece of Chinquapin Oak, that he was also experimenting with, got mixed in with the Tan Oak. It was not noticed until the Varnish was applied to the floor, then the different colored Chinquapin stood out like a sore thumb. Mal had to stand the cost of re-flooring the whole main terminal. He was not a happy camper!

The flooring was in the main terminal of the airport until the recent remodel. It would still be beautiful today if it had been taken care of. Unfortunately, the way the county takes care of things is smear wax on the dirt over the top of the floor until it becomes unrecognizable, then replace the beautiful oak floor with concrete.

Now back to the question that you asked me…
The Tan Oak can only be used for small piece lumber due to the fact that it is unstable, but it might be practical to chip as hog fuel for all of the co-generation plants that are going to run out of fuel with all of the mills closing. The plus there, is that there is a bunch of already trained woodsmen that could do that work if they get right on it. If not they will be leaving for somewhere else, because there is just no work for them here.

Rogan Coombs tried manufacturing firewood out of Tan Oak in piercy. I’m not sure why that failed. One thing that Rogan did was sell logs and put them on a landing for peole to cut firewood out of. I think that it was also an attempt to to get rid of them out of the conifer forest.

I've been told that it makes high quality paper products, but that is kind of a moot point with all of the pulp mills closed.

Sad ain’t it? Such a beautiful wood to be so totally worthless.