Posted November 13, 2011

Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times Donnie Reese, right, of the Virginia Tech Forestry Club raises a wood splitting mall while preparing firewood for club customers with fellow club members Monday afternoon. The club harvests, cuts and splits the wood as a fund raiser for club travel, gear and equipment. The club has about 40 members and firewood sales are its main fund raiser.

By Jeff Sturgeon

The Roanoke Times | 381-1661

RINER — If you’ve been happy buying firewood in those portable, plastic-wrapped bundles from the grocery store because a few sticks will do for the season, then don’t call The Woodshed.

There, firewood is mass produced in a mill for customers who heat primarily or partially with wood. To achieve industrial-scale production, the staff uses a 48-inch cut off saw, ram and splitter. An order fills a dump truck and costs hundreds of dollars.

Wood is plentiful in Appalachia, owner James Lucas said.

“There’s just a shortage of fools like us to mess with it,” he quipped.

Here, a few miles outside Christiansburg, is a businesses that seems a throwback to an earlier time. In 1940, half of Virginia households heated with coal or coke and 40 percent used wood. Today, electricity and gas are dominant heating fuels. Wood, coal, fuel oil and solar energy are in the minority.

Wood heats 6.6 percent of homes in the Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford metro area and about half that in the Roanoke metro area, according to the 2010 American Community Survey, a sample of households by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“It puts out a lot of BTUs,” said Bill Worrell, an agent with Virginia Cooperative Extension.

Lucas said he believes wood heating is increasing, with one driver being higher electricity rates. So people perceive it as cheaper. The extension services refers people to the U.S. Energy Information Administration for detailed look at the cost effectiveness of wood heat compared with conventional fuels.

Faithful followers of wood heating are now stacking their winter supplies.

There are two main categories of firewood vendors: commercial businesses that process firewood principally or as a secondary to tree care (and often operate from a fixed location with firewood processing machinery), and seasonal firewood delivery services run by entrepreneurs with a strong backs, a chain saw, axe and a pickup or trailer.

In the first category is The Woodshed, which after more than 15 years in business is still making truckloads of seasoned oak, locust, cherry, hickory and the rest.

On a recent afternoon, Lucas was at work.

“We’re going to make some firewood. Lots of it. Don’t try this at home,” he said after hitting the ignition of the diesel-fired machine to get the blade turning.

Lucas, 44, sat in the sawdust-flecked operator’s chair inside a wooden hut. By depressing a series of foot pedals and pulling hand levers, he slid a tree-length log beneath his saw, applied a clamp and brought down the cutter, which sliced off a section that fell into a metal trough. A hydraulic ram pushed the chunk of wood against a splitter, yielding five sticks of firewood. A conveyor carried the firewood to the bed of a large truck.

The old adage about using the right tool for the job applies here. The roaring machine is a firewood factory, producing two cords of firewood in — enough to fill a 8-foot-by-10-foot dump truck with four foot sides — in about 70 minutes.

The Woodshed, which does not allow wood pickup on its premises, operates on a former dairy farm that’s been in the Lucas family for years.

Lucas’ dad, George, who is in his 70s, has a forestry degree from Virginia Tech and experience in the forest products industry. After spending years selling forest-products equipment such as sawmill installations, he turned to logging and purchased a firewood processor as a sideline.

James Lucas, who went to college in Ohio and worked in the forest products business himself, later picked up the firewood sideline and turned it into a full-time business.

The advantages are that he gets to work outdoors, is independent, faces no risk of being outsourced and meets colorful people, he said.

“I like trees,” he added, “which is ironic for someone who earns his living sawing them into pieces.”

Lucas voiced respect for the loggers who harvest trees in the forest. The Woodshed purchases from logging companies their low-grade timber not suited for lumber or veneer. It’s the dregs of the forest, the same grade used in pulp mills and the production of oriented strand board, an engineered wood product. All timber seasons for about a year.
Lucas processes the trees into firewood year around, working a little less in the summer and going full bore in late fall. He drives the delivery truck, too.

“Our delivery, that’s just the final link in a long, strong chain,” Lucas said.

Video by Ryan Loew | Music by Kevin MacLeod

RINER — Meet James Lucas, owner of The Woodshed. Lucas processes trees into firewood throughout the year, going full bore in late fall. He drives the delivery truck, too.

No related posts.