By Alexa Vorster, Wood-Mizer Oceania
September 4, 2026
Thirty-Eight and Starting Over
After 17 years with the New South Wales Police Force, Ross Andriske was told it was time to stop. Not by choice, but by his doctors, and ultimately by his own body. Years of accumulated trauma had taken their toll, and at 38 Ross was medically retired: a child on the way, a mortgage to pay, and no clear path forward.
The doctors' verdict was blunt. "You'd just seen enough grief. They said, 'All your results are through the roof for anxiety and depression, anger management, not wanting to leave the house, always on edge thinking the worst will happen. I think it's time we say you're medically unfit to continue,'" Ross recalls. But long before the paperwork was signed, Ross had already found his therapy. He just hadn't realised it would become his livelihood.
Sawdust as Medicine
Working with wood had been Ross's outlet towards the end of his policing career, a way to quiet the noise. By that point, all his other recreational activities had stopped. The surfing, the fishing five times a week -gone. Life felt meaningless. He would simply sit at home, staring into the abyss. "You cannot truly understand mental health unless you're going through it," he says. "I am lucky to find timber as my saviour. I could have easily been another male suicide statistic."
Fancy timber work is not his thing, he's quick to point out. Simple builds suit him better -tabletops, desktops, functional pieces. "I never did any fancy joinery because that didn't sit well with me. I'd get too frustrated. It was the simple stuff," Ross says. He got into resin work too, and slowly, a 6m x 6m backyard shed became a place of genuine peace.
His first real piece still sits at home today: a bench made from pin oak, built with a handheld circular saw and a router sled. No table saw, no fancy setup. Just patience and a growing love of timber. Years after the discharge, the question became: could this backyard hobby actually support a family? Ross decided to find out.
The Mill That Started It All
Ross's first major equipment decision was a Wood-Mizer LX50 portable sawmill. An entry-level machine, by his own admission, but that was the point. He'd looked over the build quality and talked to mates who already ran bigger Wood-Mizer mills. "The LX50 was my sample mill," Ross says. "I looked at the quality and thought, 'I'll give it a run.'" That kind of word-of-mouth is how most Australian sawyers find their way to Wood-Mizer, the company that invented the portable sawmill in 1982. In sheds and paddocks across the country, the recommendation usually comes from someone already running one
The LX50 did its job. It answered the question that started all this: yes, the hobby could support a family. It built the customer base and gave Ross the confidence to take the next step. The plan was deliberate: cut enough timber to pay for the mill, sell the LX50 to a mate, and put the money toward the upgrade he'd had his eye on from day one. Wood-Mizer's thin-kerf blades helped the numbers work, squeezing more saleable boards out of every log.
His upgrade was the Wood-Mizer LT15WIDE, with the extra cutting capacity to handle larger, imperfect logs without compromise. "I wanted that little bit of versatility," Ross explains. "If it was a 700mm log with a few imperfections I wanted to keep, I'd have enough room to work with it." With the widest cutting capacity in its class, the LT15WIDE takes logs up to a metre across, so Ross's 700mm logs sit well inside its comfort zone, imperfections and all. Rather than use the standard trailer, Ross had a structural welder mate build a completely separate welded base with 200mm steel beams and eight adjustable legs that can be raised or lowered with a drill -his own brand of over-engineering. And he runs Wood-Mizer tungsten carbide blades exclusively, a premium option that earns its price in dense Australian hardwoods. "The cut quality is just a lot better," Ross adds. The mill backs the blade up, with blade guide rollers and cast iron band wheels holding everything steady in the cut.
The next machine on Ross's radar is the Wood-Mizer LT40, the hydraulic workhorse mill that has anchored sawmilling businesses for decades. Its hydraulic loading, clamping, and log turning shift the heavy lifting from the sawyer to the machine. It's the same mill Queensland tonewood specialist David Linton has trusted for over 30 years, and it would be Ross's third Wood-Mizer. "I'll be an old man by then and I'll be lazy," Ross laughs. "We'll have a forklift to move everything around. We call it car park milling." The forklift would run the yard and the hydraulics would run the log, so nothing on site gets lifted by hand.
One thread runs through Ross's account of the journey: the people. "The biggest thing I found with Wood-Mizer is the customer service," Ross says. He speaks warmly of Liz at Combined Knife and Saw in Queensland and the broader Wood-Mizer Australia team. For someone entirely self-taught, knowing help was a phone call away made all the difference.
115 Species and Counting
Today, from a workshop in Oak Flats on the New South Wales South Coast, Bearded Bloke Timber Collective stocks 115 timber species and counting. Hardwoods from Africa, Indonesia, and the Americas sit alongside sustainably sourced Australian species, ethically obtained from storm-felled trees and long-term industry contacts Ross has built over years. Buyers make the trip from Sydney and beyond to see the racks for themselves, and orders ship across Australia and overseas. "A lot of people say there's more variety here than in Sydney," Ross says, humbled by the remark.
The variety draws people in; the quality keeps them coming back. Ross recently qualified as a Visual Hardwood Grader, so every structural piece he sells has a trained eye behind it, and he backs it all with a 100% satisfaction guarantee, the kind of promise that comes naturally to a man who spent 17 years keeping his word for a living. The slabs feed a custom furniture line as well: live-edge dining tables, vanities, hallway consoles, each project starting with a face-to-face consultation at the workshop. It's the metre-wide cut of the LT15WIDE that makes slabs like those possible.
More Than a Timber Yard
There's something about wood that draws people in and pulls them together. Every board carries a grain, a history, a story, and customers who come for the timber tend to stay for the yarn. At a small business like Ross's, buying a board also means backing the bloke who cut it.
The business name was his wife's idea, and a friend designed the logo. It turned heads from the start; women kept asking whether it came on a shirt. So, Ross printed 50 for his first wood show and sold out in a day. "Now we do stickers, stubby holders, you name it," Ross says. "I can't believe how quickly this has taken off." People weren't just buying a shirt. They were backing the story.
The brand has become a way of giving back. Ross sponsors local mental health groups, sporting clubs, and timber organisations, and gives school students discounts on their project timber. He shops locally, employs locally, and runs a business that is genuinely woven into the community it serves.
Growing the Collective
Ross has always known that building something sustainable means not trying to do everything alone. This year he hired his first employee - Bailey, a 20-year-old with a passion for woodturning who turns up happy and keen every day. Bailey has since grown into the front man of the business, taking on increasingly complex builds as his skills develop. Ross also has support managing his social media and fielding customer enquiries. The name says it all: this was always meant to be a collective.
The Ninth Generation
Ross's almost-four-year-old son already knows his way around the workshop, pulling timber from the shelves and shadowing his dad around the forklift. He is the ninth generation of an Australian family with roots stretching back nearly 200 years, but the legacy he inherits will look different from the one Ross once expected to leave behind.
"He'll never know me by my previous employment," Ross says. "He'll just know me in the wood shop, which I'm kind of happy with."
That simple truth says a lot. The badge may have shaped Ross's first career, but timber has helped shape the life that came after it: steadier, quieter, and built with his own hands. What began as therapy in a 6m x 6m backyard shed has become a business, a community, and a place where his son can grow up seeing work as something honest, creative, and full of care.
For Ross Andriske, the bearded bloke who traded the badge for the bandsaw, the message is straightforward. "If you put your mind to it, you can do it," Ross says. "You just have to be a genuine person. I don't try to be fancy -I just give clients an honest answer and advice. When you can show the client the whole process from tree to table, it puts your business in the spotlight."
His website carries a simple promise: everything is made with love. From a man whose first career ended because he had seen enough grief, those words are more than marketing. They are the measure of how far he has come, and what he is building for the generation that comes next.
Ross would like to especially acknowledge the people who stood beside him through the hardest years -his wife Carmen, son Leo and dog Winston, his mother and father, and friends Sue Martin, Luke Reruick, Kris Gardner and Derek Oak. Without their guidance and support, he says, his story could have ended very differently.
Bearded Bloke Timber Collective | Oak Flats, NSW | thebeardedbloketimbercollective.com.au | Crafted with heart, built to last.