Milling Cedar By Hand -- Retiree Uses Discarded Wood As Fencing, Roofing Materials

-- LAKE FOREST PARK

Only the blunt ``bak, bak, bak'' sound of wood splitting betrays the business behind the little house and its arboretum of a garden.

Beneath swaying fir, hemlock and maple branches, a man who used to spend hours at his desk as a chemical engineer for Boeing turns his back yard into a workshop.

Joseph Rantz bends over a stump of wood where a block of old-growth cedar lies and, using a cleaverlike tool, he hand-splits the first of many fence rails.

A few more bangs on the tool, called a froe, and a couple of turns on the handle and there's a whiff of cedar - a mere announcement that he's cracked the six-by-six again.

Rantz hand-splits cedar roof shakes, stakes and fence posts, transforming what loggers and nature together have set aside as junk wood into sought-after fencing and roofing materials.

Hand-split, custom-made cedar products have been Rantz preoccupation since the late 1970s, after he retired.

When he began the business, old-growth cedar even could be found in Lake Forest Park. At that time, he was able to gather materials from vacant lots around the area, he said.

``It used to be you'd drive around and you'd be on stump land,'' said Rantz, 76, who's lived in his Lake Forest Park home for 50 years.

But about five years ago, ``I ran out of cedar locally. Houses started springing up.''

Now, he scouts the forests in the Stevens Pass area, between Skykomish and Scenic on Highway 2, for felled old-growth cedar logs.

Armed with his power saw, he cuts these logs into pieces and hauls them home in his red Chevy pickup.

Back in the city, the logs are cut to size and then hand-split according to specifications of clients from as far north as San Juan Island to as far south as Portland. His projects range from mortised fences to grape stakes, boxes, trellises and cedar roof shakes.

Searching for the right cedar logs in forests can take a whole day, said Rantz, who especially looks for old-growth logs with long trunks free of knots.

They're easier to cut and work with, he says.

``It's like hunting for gold,'' he said. ``You split an old tree and you get this beautiful aroma of cedar.''

He has permits to take fallen cedar logs from the forest and transport them home, he said.

His two-acre property, encircled by 1,350 feet of old-growth cedar picket fence, is home to one of the about 34 home occupation businesses in Lake Forest Park.

Rantz, who at 6 feet 2 inches towers in his low-ceilinged living room even as he stoops to show a gold medal from the XI Olympiad, was inclined toward athletic activities when he was young.

He was a member of the University of Washington crew that won a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics held in Hitler's Germany.

Although he isn't involved in athletics anymore, he enjoys the physical exertion involved in scouring the woods, cutting a trail for his wheelbarrow, chopping and carrying blocks of wood, he said.

But he doesn't quite remember why he chose to work with wood after retiring from Boeing.

``Doing white-collar desk work never really gave me much exercise,'' he said. ``I'm sure I was overweight.''

He was not, said his wife, Joyce.

``You were OK,'' she said. ``You just wanted to chop wood.''

Maybe so, he conceded. Rantz's grandfather, a minister, ran a sawmill in Pennsylvania. His father operated a sawmill in Sequim, he said. Later, his father ran a sawmill in North Creek and a shingle mill in the Kenmore area.

``I got some sawdust in my veins,'' he said.