The Lumberjack

A while back I got the idea to do a new print zine concentrating on the Pacific Northwest, but like most things I think of, it sits in the idea pile. I was going to call it Northwest Lumberjack, partially because of the implied pun and partly because you average Portland area skater often dresses like a lumberjack/longshoreman. I think its a good idea, but I don’t really shoot skate photos anymore, or have any money to spend on printing. For that matter, it seems like every skate publication of any merit has a Portland bureau. So there likely won’t be a Northwest Lumberjack zine. Maybe a one off issue of Skate and Annoy. In keeping with the lumberjack theme heres a skateboard made from a piece of wood, not laminated. Tim Laidllaw was camping when he spotted a section of a tree floating in the river and thought it might make a nice skateboard.

By Tim Laidlaw

In a drunken stupor while camping Aug 13th saw a plank of wood floating in a river from the cliff overlooking the river near our site. It looked like a fun project and I thought I’d be able to whittle a longboard out of it with my dad. I hiked down and got the piece and began drying it over the fire when I got it back to camp, then in the shed until Oct 15th when I brought it over to dad’s shop to begin.

Well I was pretty hammered when I drug this back to camp and figured I’d find out just how crazy of an idea it was when I got all the bark off of it with the draw knife. Once the bark was off I could not contain my stoke and worked my ass off to get a basic shape but it still had a bad twist in the piece I couldn’t work out by just shaping the bottom. My idea was to leave the piece as raw as possible and I so wanted not to have to work the riding surface, that first day dad and I spent 4 hours working on the piece and ended with a basic shape

The next Saturday I carefull chose my center line and worked a bit more of the twist off the bottom before making the painfull decision to use another tool and plane the riding surface to minimize the twist even further and that did the trick. Just a little more refining of the shape before hitting the local skate shop for some supplies and talk Andrew into adding the finishing touch to this piece. Once back at the shop it was time to finalize the shape, set the wheel base, bolt some wheels to it and take it for a ride

The log ride rolls pretty true and rides real nice but still has some issues I will address this coming Sunday. It will primarily be a novelty piece in the armory but can be ridden like all the rest, I’m looking forward to hitting up Tabor on it for the shot of coming through the trees on it.