Steve Evans cannot bear the thought of good timber going to waste or landfill. Much of the stock at his Ironbark Re-engineered yard in North Canterbury came from the Lyttelton wharves, dismantled after the Christchurch earthquakes, and he has no intention of sourcing more. “I need another lifetime to get through everything that I’ve got here,” he told RNZ today. “And I think that worries my son, who thinks he’s gonna have to move in here and deal to it.”
Evans’s life has been marked by a series of practical, sometimes dangerous trades: baking pies, working as a professional hunter and fisherman, jumping from helicopters to recover deer, running a helicopter business and a succession of roles in forestry and firewood. Those years eventually led him to a interest in ironbark, a dense hardwood prized for its durability and weathered character.
“It’s actually an Australian hardwood,” Evans explained. “Most people don’t really know what it is, but it’s one of the Eucalyptus species. “Most people know what jarrah is, and ironbark is like it, but actually a lot harder than what jarrah is.”
The species’s reputation for strength and resistance to decay has long made it suitable for heavy engineering tasks such as wharves and bridges. Ranging in colour from reddish-brown to dark brown, ironbark is noted for resistance to moisture, insects and rot, and its thick bark offers protection against fire.
And though ironbark is still imported from Australia for cladding, flooring, decking and structural members, reclaimed planks are used for a variety of purposes. “So when the tourists arrive, the buildings look like they’ve been there for 100 years, even though they may have been there for two.”
Wood Central understands Evans yard occupies about two and a half acres of a former railway corridor near Oxford, a narrow strip where trains once ran to sawmills in the foothills. “It’s two and a half acres and very long and narrow,” he said. “It’s part of the old railway corridor, and the trains used to come through Oxford to the sawmills in the foothills.”
“There was a station up the end of this property,” whilst a rough-coated Jack Russell named Sue keeps watch over stacks of timbers, a small domestic presence amid the industrial history of the site.
He mills much of his stock on-site using a classic New Zealand circular saw and a Mahoe super mill, a friction mill that travels on a large beam and is operated by a friction lever. Evans praises the machine for its reliability and precision. “The Mahoe saw is built in the North Island – a couple of brothers, the Bergmans, have been building them for years. “It’s a marvellous piece of gear and Mahoe is where they’re built.”
