Woodworking - How to Select Lumber for your wood projects?
Some craftsmen buy their wood project by project. They design and lay out a piece of furniture, calculate the amount and type of wood required, then embark on a quest for exactly what they need. Other woodworkers stockpile beautiful or interesting pieces of wood even before they have a specific project in mind. Picking through the piles at the local wood dealership, surveying felled logs at a building site or scavenging bucked logs left over from roadside tree work, these craftsmen accumulate promising wood in the drying shed-a supply that serves as an inspiration for future work.
Whatever your approach, there are several sources to cover in your search for raw materials. The most obvious is the local lumberyard. Some yards stock specialty items, depending on demand in the areas they service; lumberyards along the coast, for example, might carry mahogany and teak for boat construction and repair. But because most yards primarily supply the construction trades, your solid-wood choices will probably be limited to structural softwood lumber and perhaps an occasional piece of oak. For a wider choice of hardwoods, and for wood carving and turning blanks, you will have to range farther afield. Look in the Yellow Pages for dealerships that specialize in fine hardwoods, or scan the advertisements in woodworking magazines for mail-order woodworking-supply companies.
You will pay top dollar for hardwoods bought from a retail source, but in return you will generally receive material that has been graded for quality using the standards established by the National Hardwood Lumber Association. In addition, some care has probably been taken to control the moisture content of the stock during its stay in the yard. You can also ask the retailer to furnish stock that is surfaced to a uniform thickness-a necessity for woodworkers who do not have access to a power planer.
There are other, less costly ways to obtain wood. If you live near a small sawmill, you may find good quality lumber at a very low price. However, the wood will probably be green, rough and ungraded-and it must be stickered, seasoned and surfaced before it can be used for furniture. Bigger sawmills prefer to deal with large volumes of wood and maybe reluctant to fill small orders. One answer is to pool your material needs with those of other woodworkers. Some sawmills will sell you their "planer outs"-small pieces of varying widths and thicknesses that can be bought at bargain prices.
It may also be economical for you to buy wood that has been recycled after many years of use in barns, factories, wharves and other structures. You may also find an opportunity to do your own recycling. Reusing old wood makes sense environmentally, and it is rapidly becoming the only legal way of obtaining some species. In addition, recycled boards that were cut from straight-grained old-growth timber may be superior to fresh lumber cut from smaller trees. There are drawbacks to recycling wood, however. Wear, rot and insects may add up to a waste factor of 50 percent or more. And you should expect to extract many nails, bolts and staples-and still ruin saw blades in encounters with hidden metal.
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Questions and Answers
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