Exotic Wood Importer

Located west of the small town of Gardner in southern Colorado, the area boasts spectacular views. The Wet Mountains and San Isabel National Forest lie to the north, the Sangre de Cristos to the west and the Culebra Range to the south. A good portion of surrounding land belongs to the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. No one would expect to find a collection of rare, exotic lumber in such a remote location, but C. S.

Woods carries products from all over the world, buying logs internationally, drying and cutting locally and delivering in Colorado, northern New Mexico, southern Wyoming and many other parts of the country. “A big part of our market is providing unique woods for counter and table tops and serving the small woodworker,” says owner Kent Mace. Custom home builders seek his products for exterior siding, interior paneling, decorative trims and made-to-order cabinetry.

The C.S. Woods offices are not fancy. Mace shares a small room with two employees. The staff totals 10 people and all are eager to talk about wood. The show piece of the office is a massive, irregularly shaped coffee table that dominates the entryway. While most similar tables are made from a slab of wood mounted on legs, this one is half of an entire burl (a bulging, cancer-like growth on a tree). The knots and gnarls of the burl’s exterior form the table’s natural base.

Mace acquired a large supply of burls when he hired two loggers to find, cut and haul burls from the big leaf maple forests along the Canadian border. “My dad was a wood collector,” Mace says. “I grew up moving his wood.” Later his father ran a gallery in Aspen selling custom furniture from Mace’s shop. Moving into specialty lumber supply,

Mace personally supervised a 25-person wood shop and installation crew. “I was on the road a lot,” he says. When his wife pointed out how much time he spent away from the family, Mace changed his business model. With a childhood friend as business partner, he settled into his current business eight years ago. Today, Mace likes to buy from small loggers and send the logs to a mill near where the trees are cut. He often goes to the site to supervise milling. An on-site sawmill equipped with a conveyorfed helical planer also allows C.S. Woods to custom cut lumber. “Let’s take a tour and look at some wood,” Mace says. He grabs a plastic spray bottle of citrus thinner and roams through storerooms, tapping stacks of wood and tossing out the names as he passes.

The names are intriguing — bubinga, cocobolo, vertical grain Englemann spruce. He tips a slab from a stack. It appears dull as prairie dirt. With a quick squirt from his spray bottle, the surface glows with the rich color and pattern of finished wood. Mace beams. “Imagine that as a tabletop,” he says. Recently, the company began supplying reclaimed materials, such as white oak from a demolished warehouse in Ohio and Wyoming snow fencing weathered to a blue grey patina. Other woods come from sustainable forestry programs like the Douglas fir cut for fire mitigation in New Mexico.

Among the unique products is some old growth Douglas fir from Vancouver, British Columbia. When a floating bunkhouse in a logging camp was torn down, four logs were uncovered. Mace bought these heavy logs for the beauty such underwater curing brings to the wood. Drying wood to equalize the moisture content to the climate where it is used takes up a large amount of time in the specialty wood business, in particular for C.S. Woods.

In the Rocky Mountain area, wood must be dryer than in other parts of the United States. To prevent warping and cracking, the interior core wood must dry at the same rate as the outer shell wood, Mace explains. West African bubinga, for example, takes six years to cure to sale condition. The slabs are coated with beeswax oil and allowed to dry very slowly to match the Colorado climate. Used for tabletops, a slab of this wood may cost $10,000 by the time it comes to market. Three kilns speed the drying process for many types of wood.

A venting kiln cures small projects like one log. A state-of-theart, computer-controlled AirVac kiln creates a vacuum to flatten lumber under steam and 10,000 pounds of pressure. The third kiln is a story of innovation. In 2009, Mace met with staff from his local electric cooperative, San Isabel Electric Association, to discuss his high electric bills and challenges in getting wood properly dried. The San Isabel staff suggested an unusual application of the energy-saving electric thermal storage program. Eventually, Mace signed on.

After much consultation with engineers from Steffis, the manufacturer of the ETS equipment, installation was completed in January 2010 and the first kiln run took place on February 16, 2010. A large solar kiln was converted to a dehumidification kiln and connected to three customized ETS units. At night, special high-density ceramic bricks in the ETS units store heat using electric energy purchased at a low cost during “off peak” hours. During the day, this stored heat raises the kiln temperature to 140 degrees, causing the lumber to release its moisture.

Most kilns vent the hot moist air outside. In this kiln, however, the hot, moistureladen air circulates over refrigeration coils. The moisture condenses to liquid and drains away while the hot air continues to circulate inside the kiln. Stepping into this room-size kiln stacked top to bottom with lumber is like entering a sauna. The humidity is 98 percent. It is hard to imagine the wood is being dried. “I don’t think anyone else in the United States is using ETS in this way,” Mace says of his operation. “It’s phenomenal to have monstrous quantities of inexpensive heat.”

The ETS system at C.S. Woods has capacity to store over 1 million Btu (British thermal units) of heat. Mace says his off-peak cost is less than half his normal electric rate. This is not Mace’s first unique venture. Internet service in the valley was limited to slow dial-up systems that could not support a website for C.S. Woods. Mace approached the Huerfano County commissioners for permission to place a tower on a mountaintop to bring in high speed service. The commissioners said he should provide service for the whole valley. So, Mace and some business partners started DD-Wireless.

Today the company has 20 towers and serves some 600 people in Huerfano and Custer counties. Access to high-speed Internet has allowed a number of his customers to operate businesses from their homes. Mace hopes to expand service to other rural areas in the future. “Internet access kept us alive when the lumber business crashed in the recent economy,” says Mace. From the C.S. Woods website (www.cswoods.com) a customer can view photos of the current inventory. Each piece of wood is bar coded and photographed (both sides and the ends) when it is ready for sale.

Clicking on a photo brings up available sizes, quantities and prices. An email inquiry results in a consultation with a staff member to be sure the particular wood fits the intended use. “We have a very low rate of return because we do lots of presale work with customers,” says Mace. “The customer can choose the exact boards he wants from the website.” Mace’s daughter, Alana, designed and manages the company’s website and computer systems, working remotely from her home in Broomfield. The website offers a wealth of information about the company and its products.

It also showcases finished work by customers, including furniture, sculptures, musical instruments and handcrafted sleds. The site includes a section of helpful charts, tables and tips for woodworkers. In addition to ready-to-use lumber, C.S. Woods also offers a full custom wood shop producing fine furniture, cabinetry and flooring. One recent project, featured on the website with start-to-finish photos, is a 29-foot irregularly shaped bar top built from horse chestnut and delivered to a Denver customer. Collector’s Specialty Woods proves that, with a bit of creative thinking, off the beaten path can be a innovative, productive and beautiful place to do business.

This is Cynthia Becker’s fifth feature for Colorado Country Life. She is a freelance writer from Pueblo, and her newest novel is a middle grade biography, Chepita: The Peacemaker.