I live near a wonderful park here in Philadelphia, one with an active community support group that loves to do great things for the place. Now, last week, during those powerful winds, two trees suffered extensive damage. One, a large sycamore, was toppled over.
Now, it's one thing to watch as someone comes with a chainsaw to carve a tree into discs for mulching. But it's another to be an aspiring woodworker, and look at the tree and wonder, "Gee, if I knew someone with the means to cut this thing into long boards, I'd be able to stockpile some nice wood, and we could build something nice for the park with it." And, since a park with about 300 trees is bound to have a few fall-overs and cut-downs over the years, it occurred to me that maybe our park's Friends group ought to know what to do for this. (I mean, mulch you can get anywhere, but fresh wood? In a city?)
So I'd like to know if there are any people in the Philly area who have portable machines which can slice a tree into flat, dryable boards. our group may be interested in having such a person come out when a tree comes down, slicing up some boards, and enabling some decent use of these things. And since we don't have any storage space to dry them out, we'd like to know if there's a way for the harvested boards to be stored in a place that _can_ dry them out properly and kept until we need'em for a project. I'd also like to know about cost, turnaround time, whether the labor can be paid for in wood, etc.
Obviously, we're not looking to harvest healthy trees. We like our park's trees. But when they fall over, they ought to be put to use.