Fascinating!

[JPG]

JPG,
You are quite right, 12" would be a tad short for trailer decking. Something got changed between the 1st post and the 7th. In the 1st post the length was 20'.

Roger

I was referring to wood fibre length.

[sawmill]

I don't think I would use any type of popular or cotton wood for trailer decking. If it is exposed to weather laying flat it rots before your eyes. White oak is best for decking

[robinson46176]

Trees with a zillion branches from down low-ish like in the picture are frequently "coppice" wood that grew from the stump of a cut tree's stump. I have a 17 acre woods in the next county that was logged a number of years before we bought it and it was full of coppice wood. When we got it I started cutting most of the sprouts off leaving only about 3 or4 per stump. A lot of the sprouts were about 2" to 3" in diameter plus a lot of little ones about the size of my thumb. The bigger ones made a little firewood. That was in the 1960's and I later cut off all but one of the sprouts on each stump leaving the best one. The ones I cut off were big enough to make decent firewood, some were 6" to 8" in diameter. Today a lot of those single sprouts are very tall single trunks and run from 18" to 24" in diameter.
Coppice wood grows very fast because it already has a big huge root system and is just looking for a tree to feed. That woods is in a river bottom area of a fair sized river (Big Flatrock) that never dries up no matter how dry the summer so those trees never suffer for water. I lost a couple of acres of them a number of years ago to a tornado but the rest are OK. A really nice woods next to me there was probably about 40 acres and it was virtually wiped out. It is coming back now but slowly like the couple of acres of mine that were destroyed.

I haven't studied this article closely but it seems to give a decent overview to coppicing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing


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[JPG]

Amazing what one learns here!

Thanks!!!!