Canon - Spirit of St. Louis

[DrBill]

Probably getting off-topic here, but the species in the Oakland and Berkeley hills east of San Francisco was blue gum. It was imported from Australia around 1900 as a lumber source, but the importers picked the wrong species and found it almost impossible to make lumber suitable for construction. (Probably dulled their saw blades too quickly...) I did know of one house that had blue gum veneer paneling in the dining room (ca. 1920), but not much else. They also tried using it for paper making (now we're on topic), but that failed, too. The blue gum has spread quickly throughout the Bay Area, and has been displacing the native Monterey pine. So now we have two incredibly flammable trees dominating the mountain slopes east of San Francisco (blue gum is full of oil), and we've seen incredible fires in the area every few years. Happily, my wife and I live there no longer, but we've had several friends who have been burned out in the fires that occurred during the last decade or two.

[CharlieC]

Sorry about the off topic....

Blue gum is certainly not the best timber species among the Eucalypts. The old time lumbermen probably tried to process the logs the same way as the native timbers - doesn't work. In Oz the eucalypt logs are left to dry for months before milling otherwise the sawn timber will warp and distort from fluid drying out of internal closed pores in the wood. There are sawmills in Oz now that microwave the logs to open the closed pores so that the timber will dry without warping.

You can coexist with eucalypts but you've got to do a lot of maintenance stuff to reduce the fire risk.

Regards,

Charlie

[dansls1]

Don't worry about the OT. Interesting stuff here

[Don Boose]

Thanks for the additional info on paper and card, Bill.

I enjoyed the discussion you and Charlie had on blue gum trees. It took me back to our conversations when I was at language school in Monterey in the early 1970s and you were in SF -- as I recall, you gave me the same run-down on blue gum trees when you visited.

Don

[Leif Ohlsson]

I thought it would be worth continuing this discussion in a new thread, starting from scratch, so to speak. Go here.