You never know what you're going to come across when doing urban forestry. We're currently working on a property out in Bonita (among countless other projects). The husband and wife have a nice property and are redoing their landscaping to be more focused on native plants as well as starting their own garden so they had a bunch of eucalyptus trees cut down, but they didn't want to just discard them.
They found us online and have commissioned us to build them some rustic outdoor furniture and a dining table. Dan and I started milling some cool looking stumps for a huge outdoor table a few weeks ago and then recently came back to start milling the material for the outdoor bench and indoor dining table. (see some pics of the stumps and more after the jump)
While milling, we came across a few of the above pictured, longhorned borer beetles. They're menacing looking if you ask me, and they can make quick work of the outer layer of a tree. A healthy eucalyptus tree would be able to fight off a beetle by sort of flooding the area the beetle is invading and drown the beetle, but once a tree is felled, there's really no defense for the tree.
We don't particularly like using pesticides, but since we kiln our own wood, we can eliminate the problem simply by getting the wood up to 150ยบ or so. Speaking of kilns, our main kiln is a solar powered kiln but we do have a kiln in the shop that we made utilizing a sauna heater off craigslist. It came with some funny signs that we couldn't resist not to put up:
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