Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..

Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.

Avery Earwood co-owns Wild Edge Woodcraft in Rougemont with his wife, Shannon. Earwood’s company created the bar for the soon-to-open Crafted: The Art of the Taco in downtown Mebane.

Avery Earwood co-owns Wild Edge Woodcraft in Rougemont with his wife, Shannon. Earwood’s company created the bar for the soon-to-open Crafted: The Art of the Taco in downtown Mebane.

It’s a 90-plus-degree day, and Avery Earwood is talking with one of his employees about why the smaller of his two saw mills isn’t working properly. Even though the saws are in a covered area with a fan the size of a tractor wheel blowing on them, the air is weighted with humidity and sawdust, and seems resistant to movement. 

Earwood, who, with his wife, owns Wild Edge Woodcraft, makes suggestions on what may be causing the saw to not work properly. After a few minutes, he flips a switch, and a thin saw blade that loops the log conveyor begins spinning. Thousands of metal teeth become a blur as Earwood makes a few adjustments, eyeballing where the saw will begin its cut in the log. Once set, Earwood locks in the settings and the entire saw apparatus begins a slow, smooth trip the length of the log, slicing the top layer of the tree like it was cake.

“Every day, repairs and maintenance,” Earwood said, walking away from the saw. “I dramatically underestimated the repairs and maintenance bills. That’s an old machine. Most of my equipment is old.”

 About 10 years ago, Earwood and his family moved from Buffalo, to Orange County to be closer to his corporate job. They bought a farm in Rougemont with plans to incorporate community-supported agriculture.

“I wanted to do a subscription model, sort of participatory gardening basically for people that lived in the suburban neighborhoods but couldn’t didn’t have room or skills to grow their own food and could participate in something like this,” he said. “Mother Nature taught me a harsh lesson, which is that I had no business doing that kind of gardening.”

Still, Earwood and his wife, Shannon, wanted to preserve some traditional handcrafted textiles, so they added alpacas, sheep, and goats to their farm — called Serenity Meadows Farm. They had also planned to convert a portion of the 25-acre hardwood forest into furniture, and creating pastures. Earwood would use the lumber for barns and fences on his property and for others in the more rural parts of the community. He began acquiring milling equipment and moving in that direction.

“The idea was when I turned 50 later this year, I would leave my full-time corporate job,” he said. “Covid-19 hit and that accelerated our plans. My corporate job disappeared overnight. I found myself in a position to either go find another job in the middle of a raging pandemic, or launch this small business that I had been building up, acquiring tools and equipment and infrastructure. We started that two years ago in August, which is why everything you see is still under construction. I mean, I still have house wrap on the on all the buildings because we’re trying to fly the airplane while building the airplane. And that’s tough.”

Wild Edge Woodcraft began with the intent to use the hardwoods on farm property, but then Earwood learned more about other sources for trees, including urban trees that are taken down by storms, bug damage, or to make room for development. Trees that industrial sawmills couldn’t use because they don’t have a cost-effective way to get a single tree to them; the trees are coming by ways of clear-cutting; or the trees are too large and not ideal for the highly automated sawmills. Most of those trees go into landfills.

“I used to refer to them as free trees, but I don’t anymore because they’re not free,” Earwood said. “There’s quite a bit of expense involved in me going and picking them up and transporting them. There’s the equipment and the labor and the fuel and all that kind of stuff, but it’s still an economically viable way to source that material.”

Much of what is in the log yard at Wild Edge is urban salvage, and will at some point be up-cycled into furniture. Instead of it being chopped into firewood, Wild Edge is sequestering the carbon in tables to give the wood another life. It’s what the Earwood calls ‘tree-to-table,’ and it’s the company’s mission to up-cycle as many urban trees into pieces of furniture.

Earwood’s company also specializes in what he calls ‘legacy wood,’ or ‘memory wood,’ which is when, for example, a family has a sentimental bond with a tree that has fallen — maybe an ancestor planted it — and they want to use the tree.

“We can take that tree, bring it back here, mill it, dry it and make it into something that goes into their home or into their children’s home, or their grandchildren’s home,” he said. “That’s probably my favorite part of this business. We have done quite a bit of that and it’s a lot of fun.”

Wild Edge Woodcraft offers four major services, including milling trees, drying lumber, producing ‘slabs,’ and turning slabs into furniture, mostly tables, bar tops, countertops, and floating shelves. Much of Earwood’s slab work keeps what’s known as a ‘live edge,’ which is an often misunderstood term.

“When they hear live edge they picture the bark — that very rough out exterior of the tree is not very attractive,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like something they would want to touch on a regular basis. When I ask somebody if they want their dining table to have a live edge, the first answer is ‘no.’ And then I describe what it is and I showed them pictures and they go, ‘Oh, I love that. Can I have that?’”

Earwood stood over a giant ‘butterflied’ slab, which is when a piece is sliced in two and opened next to each other. You can see in the wood some of the variations in color, lines of different thicknesses, and small holes. But the look, overall, is somewhat dull and undefined.

And then, he pours water over the slab, and it’s like going from blurry black and white to high-definition color. Even the way Earwood discussed the slab went from talking about the weight and size of the log section to pointing out the events in the life — and afterlife — of the tree.

“This piece of wood contains the entire history of this tree, right from the middle all the way out,” he said. “It’s not being cut into pieces, so you’ve got the history of this tree including what happens after it came down, because the bugs get to it after it comes down. Every now and then, we’ll have a tree that had a bug infestation and there’ll be holes throughout. It’s very common in maple trees. That creates an interesting look as well, called ambrosia, which is highly desirable because the way it It alters the grain figure of the tree.”

Another feature of some of the slabs produced at Wild Edge use of modern epoxy resins to fill gaps in wood, and filling spaces between pieces of wood. These are called river tables because the effect with the resin resembles an aerial view of a river. There are hundreds of different resins and each has different properties and cure rates and mix rates, and some react differently in different situations. 

“There’s an infinite variety of color and style in terms of mixing dyes, pigments, mica powders, glitters, things like that to color, alter, and to create the art within the resin,” Earwood said. “My goal is to complement the wood. I want the resin to sort of fade into the background, so the wood speaks the loudest.”

One piece of Earwood purchased new is a SlabMizer, which he uses to create a perfectly flat surface. Wild Edge Woodcraft can flatten huge pieces of wood up to six-feet wide by 18-feet long. The company created the bar top for the soon-to-open Crafted: The Art of the Taco on Clay Street in downtown Mebane.

“In the case of the bar top, those pieces were two 12-and-a-half-foot pieces that were three-and-a-half-feet wide. We put them up here and and did all that,” he said.

Earwood’s grandfather was a master carpenter, and as a kid, he spent his summers following him around his shop. That’s where he got the bug and decided he, too, wanted to be a professional carpenter. But life after high school took him in another direction, even though he maintained a keen interest in woodworking.

He decided 30 was the age he would devote his career full-time to being a woodworker. Then he decided 40 was the age to at last pursue his passion. Then 50 became the new goalpost, and this time it worked out. He and his wife had had three sons, and all are now grown. Earwood could finally invest himself into being a woodworker.

Time, though, wasn’t all he invested. The SlabMizer is a $40,000 piece of equipment, Earwood said, adding that most of the equipment at Wild Edge is used. The company’s planer ran $12,000; the belt-sander was $5,000. 

It also meant fortifying the infrastructure of his farm and business. “You need a lot of electricity, in our case, three-phase electricity,” Earwood said. “So getting three-phase power out here was was vital to being able to run the sawmills because my sawmills are electric. That was a pretty significant barrier to entry for for this kind of work.”

Earwood admits every step of setting up his sawmill and each of the services around has been a learning process, but he said he underestimated one area in particular.

“What surprised me is just how much waste there is in processing lumber,” he said. “Right off the bat,  there are a bunch of logs that you just can’t use because they’re warped or twisted. They grew wrong, they they have too much tension in them. So, there’s a certain percentage of logs that are just not viable for for use as lumber furniture. And then every log that is usable, starts as a circle and has to become —  mean unless it’s live edge — it has to become a square. The mathematics workout to that square is about 70 percent of the diameter of the circle. You’re losing 30 percent of the mass of that tree, the biomass of that tree, right off the bat. The first the first set of cuts, and that’s got to go somewhere. It’s either got to be chipped, go into pulp wood, or it’s got to go in and become firewood. Or, it’s got to be stacked until it goes back to nature.”

Earwood said he’s found some uses for the sawdust, including for horse farms, people with chickens who use the sawdust for bedding, and he and his wife have used it with their alpacas.

For the most part, he said, Earwood can look at a log and tell whether it’s worth cutting, but he said he’s been surprised. “Milling is a lot of fun because it’s a little bit like Christmas: you’re opening a gift and you peel back the wrapper to see to see this valuable, beautiful high-value product underneath.”

He walked around the log yard and stopped to stand next to piles of gray and colorless logs. The cut ends have initials marked on them, indicating the wood is waiting to be milled for a customer. The logs are giant, knotted, and some weighing as much as 15,000 pounds. (Earwood said he purchased a piece of equipment that was made for the U.S. Navy, then was purchased by the N.C. Dept. of Forestry, before again being auctioned.)

“It’s particularly good on the big, ugly logs to cut them open and see something beautiful,” he continued. “I get excited, particularly with the big slabs. Every time we cut one, I’m just like a kid in that Christmas, taking pictures of it. I hope that never gets old.”

Earwood said his favorite wood is walnut, but said he is also a fan of maple, and believes oak is an underrated wood. He said the ‘tree-to-table’ process usually takes more than a year, with much of that being drying time.

To learn more about Wild Edge Woodcraft, go to www.wildedgewoodcraft.com. You can also take a virtual tour of the sawmill facility by going to: https://youtu.be/r6JAjngxuq8

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