Tips on How to Make Cedar Shakes

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Cut your own shake shingles to give your home a rustic, weathered look. ILLUSTRATION: MOTHER EARTH NEWS EDITORS

I picked up the November/December 1973 issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS at a friend's cabin yesterday and began scanning it ... as I usually do any time I find an unguarded MOTHER lying around. Robert Simonson's article about making hand-split shakes immediately engrossed me. For the last three years I've lived in the rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State and derived my entire income from working in cedar salvage. I've done everything from cutting cedar shake and shingle blocks to hand-splitting tapered shakes.

As Simonson suggests, hand-splitting shakes or boards is, indeed, the most inexpensive way of roofing and covering walls from downed timber ... as long as you have a cheap source of material. Also, the axe, saw and other tools needed to cut shakes will continue to be useful around the farm long after they've served their initial purpose. Still, I found some of Simonson's remarks to be misleading and incomplete.

Hand-splitting shakes (or "tapers" as they're also called) is a relatively easy task when you're cutting high-quality, straight-grained wood ... but finding such timber free for the asking or at the $3 to $4 price that Simonson quoted just doesn't happen. (My experience has been mostly with cedar and spruce — so I'm speaking of shakes coming from these woods — but cedar has by far the best tapering qualities of any timber. It also has the longest life span due to the natural preservatives in the cedar wood).

Unless you happen to be a fortunate soul with your own cedar forest right out the back door of your homestead, you'll discover that "stumpage" — the right to cut timber in a certain area — is darn hard to get. A year or two ago, it was a snap to purchase a few windfalls from the state or the U.S. Forest Service. But small sales are almost impossible to get today ... due both to government policy changes and to an increase in stumpage rates as the market price of cedar continues to rise. Folks can forget about the $50/1,000 board feet (about 1-1/3 cords of wood) that was the average stumpage rate in years past. Most shake mills today are paying $140 to $150 per cord of cedar blocks. (The high prices being paid for cedar, coupled with the fact that there is too much government forest land to police, makes wood poaching a lucrative endeavor in my region. But the punishment is severe for those unfortunates who get caught.)