Tealight holder made from British Ash, 5cm

I’m David and I’m part of a wood fuel project that started in 2016 following a pilot by the National Forest Company. An application for grant funding was successful and in 2017 the Black to Green project was formed. A portion of the grant was used to grow the volunteer wood fuel group. Volunteers would attend sessions and take home a share of the timber felled that day. The volunteer group has evolved into Heartwood Community Woodfuel Group which now manages several woodlands for the Woodland Trust and has it’s own base near Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

As the wood fuel sessions continued, I started to look at some of the larger sections of timber that were going to end up as fire wood and thought that they looked too good to just be burnt.

As an experiment I borrowed a planking addon for a chainsaw and made a few small planks from some of the larger sections of wood. After that I bought a Granberg Small Log Mill from Alaskan Mill . I now try and get any larger sections of timber felled as the they are too large to be processed by hand tools.

This Summer I have started to work some of the first planks that I milled a couple of years ago. Once the seasoned planks had been cleaned up and cut to size the end result was quiet pleasing, as I hope you will agree.