Alan Zablonski in the storage building for wood slabs at Berkshire Products, the sawmill he began in Sheffield in 1987.
A large local maple tree trunk at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield. The sawmill specializes in cutting extra large trees that conventional sawmills cannot handle.
Alan Zablonski and his wife and business partner Joyce Vandemark stand among the stacks of drying wood slabs at Berkshire Products Inc.
A gallery of finished tables, wall art, clocks, vases and more shows off the potential products that can be made from their wood at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield.
A gallery of finished tables, wall art, clocks, vases and more shows off the potential products that can be made from their wood at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield.
A gallery of finished tables, wall art, clocks, vases and more shows off the potential products that can be made from their wood at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield.
Unique wood slabs with natural edges are sprayed with alcohol to enhance the wood grain before they are photographed, measured, categorized and stacked in the warehouse.
Thirty years ago, less than 10 percent of the company's business came from natural-edge wood, pieces without traditionally square-edge, symmetrical sides. Today, that number is between 95 and 98 percent.
The slabs at the sawmill are typically between one-and-a-quarter and four inches wide.
The urban logs cut at the sawmill hail from areas across the country, but primarily from California, Oregon and Washington.
Alan Zablonski in the storage building for wood slabs at Berkshire Products, the sawmill he began in Sheffield in 1987.
A large local maple tree trunk at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield. The sawmill specializes in cutting extra large trees that conventional sawmills cannot handle.
Alan Zablonski and his wife and business partner Joyce Vandemark stand among the stacks of drying wood slabs at Berkshire Products Inc.
A gallery of finished tables, wall art, clocks, vases and more shows off the potential products that can be made from their wood at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield.
A gallery of finished tables, wall art, clocks, vases and more shows off the potential products that can be made from their wood at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield.
A gallery of finished tables, wall art, clocks, vases and more shows off the potential products that can be made from their wood at the Berkshire Products sawmill in Sheffield.
Unique wood slabs with natural edges are sprayed with alcohol to enhance the wood grain before they are photographed, measured, categorized and stacked in the warehouse.
Thirty years ago, less than 10 percent of the company's business came from natural-edge wood, pieces without traditionally square-edge, symmetrical sides. Today, that number is between 95 and 98 percent.
The slabs at the sawmill are typically between one-and-a-quarter and four inches wide.
The urban logs cut at the sawmill hail from areas across the country, but primarily from California, Oregon and Washington.
SHEFFIELD — On a campus along Ashley Falls Road, several buildings hold thousands of visual marvels, many of which are worth thousands of dollars. These pieces draw eyes up, down and across their surfaces, their figures and markings prompting questions about their histories.
No, Sheffield hasn't added a world-class art museum recently, and these works aren't by Rockwell or Renoir. They are wood slabs, more than 10,000 slices of maples, elms, oaks, walnuts and dozens of other tree types that stand inside Berkshire Products Inc.'s lumber buildings. Founded in 1987, the company now specializes in massive live-edge wood slabs that eventually become dining room tables, headboards and wall art installations, among other uses. While Berkshire Products leaves the intricate furniture work to its many cabinetmaker clients, the initial cuts in the creative process belong to owner Alan Zablonski's production crew.
"Once you make your first cut, that determines the rest of them," Zablonski said during a recent tour of his company's site.
The process begins long before the logs are loaded onto a Wood-Mizer WM1000 sawmill. Berkshire Products' logs hail from urban areas across the country but primarily from California, Oregon and Washington. They are unhealthy, towering trees found on homeowners' properties or city roads, not downed forest trunks. The company relies on firms with cranes to help haul them away; it doesn't remove any trees itself.
"Our mission is to give a second life to large urban trees that had to be removed. These trees are too large for conventional sawmills, so in the past they were often not utilized and just disposed of," the company's website says.
The trees arrive in Sheffield on tractor-trailers before heading for the Wood-Mizer. When Zablonski first started the business, he used a smaller Wood-Mizer that he configured to make unusually wide cuts.
"Thirty years ago, there was almost nobody that could make a four-foot wide cut on a band mill. We were one of the only ones in the country that [could] do that," Zablonski said, looking at the machine situated down a hill from the home he shares with his wife and business co-owner, Joyce Vandemark. " ... That's what set us apart 30 years ago. Now, that thing's an antique."
Nearby, the WM1000 can make cuts up to 70 inches wide.
"This will cut things about five times faster than my old mill and a heck of lot faster than the chainsaw mill," he said.
"We've got one chainsaw that we use here that's got a 10-foot bar on it, and we put a chainsaw on each end," he said. "In other words, if we get a log that's too big for [the Wood-Mizer], we can cut it with a chainsaw. But it's just a lot of work, and it's harder to get a good cut."
The production crew's cuts create slabs that are typically between one-and-a-quarter and four inches wide. Sometimes, they encounter some barriers.
"When you're dealing with these types of trees [that] are always coming from out of a city, near a road, near a property line, it's not a matter if they're going to have a nail in them; it's just how many and how big the nails are," Zablonski said, showing off some porcelain lodged in a local maple log near the parking lot. "We've hit everything in them — knives, bullets, cement, where they filled the hollow of the tree full of cement, rocks, you name it."
After cutting, the wood is air-dried under greenhouses. It can take between one and four years to dry, depending on its thickness and species.
"Most sawmills are a high-volume business. We're very low-volume," Zablonski said. "Even though you see a lot of stuff here, our turnover is just so much slower. A normal mill, in one day, will cut more stuff than we'll cut in a year or two."
They eventually go to a vacuum kiln for more drying. The kiln can handle slabs as long as 18 feet, so that is about as tall as they get inside Lumber Building No. 4, the structure that holds the company's largest slabs and, consequently, established it as a national player in an increasingly coveted business. Thirty years ago, less than 10 percent of the company's business came from natural-edge, or live-edge, wood, pieces without traditionally square-edge, symmetrical sides. Today, that number is between 95 and 98 percent, according to Zablonski.
"Right now, the live-edge market is a fashion trend," Zablonski said. "It started getting really heavy about four or five years ago."
Inside Building No. 4, customers can browse an inventory that requires plenty of neck-craning for one afternoon. For example, one 14-foot, seven-inch claro walnut slab soared above some of its neighbors. It was on sale for $14,800.
"The walnuts, and it's been that way for the last five years, have been the hottest thing on the market," Zablonski said.
Long pieces are hoisted into their positions in the warehouses, forming wooden corridors. Some are there for years, but they can land in some bustling places; for instance, the company milled Berkshire Mountain Distillers' bar.
Lumber Building No. 3 offers slightly shorter and less expensive slabs. Lumber Building No. 2's are even smaller. They usually cost in the hundreds, not thousands, and sell well among locals, but not well enough to fund an entire sawmill business.
"There's a ton of competition with really small stuff," Zablonski said.
Customers are often drawn to "river" tables, slabs that have long voids within them. Slabs with circular holes, or "pond" tables, are also popular. Some of these voids will get filled with epoxy, but many buyers keep them empty, appreciating the wood's natural blemishes. It can be difficult for Zablonski and others to determine if, say, a bug-eaten side is a quality that will fetch thousands for a slab or ensure that it collects dust in the warehouse.
"What is something that's truly unique and a person wants it, and what is something that's truly a defect?" he said, explaining what they have to weigh.
Oftentimes, it's the former. Burls, rounded tree growths, look like deformations in the forest but wall art to many buyers. Some of the company's burls have even ended up on The Bridge Restaurant's walls in Sheffield, according to Berkshire Products' sales department.
Though the company doesn't make furniture, it has a sample room in Building No. 4 that perhaps inspires some customers to shell out for a slab. Wall art and epoxy-filled river tables occupy much of the space. For instance, some big leaf maple frames a mirror.
"This is where we play," Zablonski said.
The central Massachusetts native has long had a fascination with trees.
"Even as a kid, I always fooled around with wood, tree houses. I was born in a small town," he said.
He moved to the Berkshires to teach woodworking at Mount Everett Regional High School in the mid-1970s, spending eight years there.
"I'm a little bit too independent to be working under structure, so then I went on my own," he said.
His business uses all of the wood it receives. Logs that can't produce quality slabs are split into firewood or ground into mulch. More traditional lumber resides in Lumber Building No. 1, where the company's office and shipping area is located. On a recent Tuesday, some sanded slabs were in crates destined for Brooklyn, N.Y., and Indiana.
"We're trying to sell as much as we can while we're on the upswing," Zablonski said.
Benjamin Cassidy can be reached at bcassidy@berkshireeagle.com, at @bybencassidy on Twitter and 413-496-6251.
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