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Fine woodwork from construction-grade lumber
By Steve Maxwell
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If you ever sit down with a calculator, a furniture catalogue, and a lumberyard price list, you might not like what you find. As wood prices rise, it’s becoming likely you’ll have to pay more for a pile of retail lumber than you would a ready-made version of the furniture you plan to build. This is why it makes sense to seek out inexpensive sources of high-quality wood. The good news is that anyone who lives near an ordinary building supply outlet has just this kind of wood within easy reach.
The material I’m talking about is conventional, 2-inch thick construction lumber, with 2x10s and 2x12s being the prime cuts. It’s as cheap as wood gets, yet every pile includes some wonderful boards, many almost knot-free and ideal for making fine furniture.
Start by looking for a pile of boards with a grade-stamp that says “S-DRY” and a grade number of 1 or 2 somewhere on each one. You’ll also need to pay attention to grain pattern. A first-rate, construction-grade furniture plank is largely free of knots, with growth rings oriented nearly perpendicular to the board face over most of its width. This grain orientation, called quartersawn or vertical-grained, minimizes seasonal wood movement and looks great. About half the wood you’ll find in lumberyard piles makes the grade for fine-furniture applications, with perhaps 25% being this kind of exceptional, vertical-grained stock. Not bad for wood that usually costs less than 80 cents per board foot!
The real trick with construction-grade wood is learning how to dry it. Even though S-DRY wood is kiln dried, it’s 16% to 19% moisture content is still way too wet for furniture. You’ll need to stack it in a heated, indoor space for several months to get it down to the required 6% to 8%. And winter is an excellent time for this because indoor humidity levels are so low. Space each layer of stacked wood, and speed wood-drying with an oscillating household fan pointed at the pile. Set it on low speed, and leave it on 24 hours a day. A hand-held moisture meter makes it easy to see how drying is progressing, though carefully measuring board widths each day works well, too. When board width stops shrinking (probably after two or three weeks under ideal conditions), your wood will be dry enough to begin work.
Although your lumber will be pretty dry at this stage, it’s still likely to misbehave as moisture is released from surfaces newly-exposed to the air. That’s why you’ll need to restack wood for more drying after each work session. Every time you expose new surfaces to the air, it encourages more drying that leads to shrinkage and twisting. Stacking isn’t a big deal, just something that needs to happen as you clean up after each work session.
As you start rough-cutting your construction-grade planks to length and width, keep in mind that the most precious wood you’ve got is the tight-grained areas, the ones with growth rings nearly perpendicular to the board face. Crosscut parts to rough length, then reserve sections of this prized wood for the most important areas of your project. Joint and edge-glue these into larger panels, then plane to final thickness.
About 10% of what you brought home probably has a very striking grain pattern made of light and dark growth rings. You can get the most out of this wood by slicing it into 1/4”-thick slabs, edge-gluing these together, planing them down to about 3/16”-thick, then gluing them to a solid wood substrate. Even if you don’t have a bandsaw you can still cut your own veneer like this on a tablesaw, using alternating passes across the blade. First rip the wood on-edge along one side, then flip it over and repeat on the next edge, with cuts meeting in the middle. Ordinary wood glue and lots of clamps do a great job securing veneer panels to drawer faces, cabinet tops and any other small, prominent surface.
Great wood and great prices available everywhere. That’s the raw material of a fabulous hobby that saves money, too.
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Fine woodwork from construction-grade lumber
By Steve Maxwell
|
|
|
If you ever sit down with a calculator, a furniture catalogue, and a lumberyard price list, you might not like what you find. As wood prices rise, it’s becoming likely you’ll have to pay more for a pile of retail lumber than you would a ready-made version of the furniture you plan to build. This is why it makes sense to seek out inexpensive sources of high-quality wood. The good news is that anyone who lives near an ordinary building supply outlet has just this kind of wood within easy reach.
The material I’m talking about is conventional, 2-inch thick construction lumber, with 2x10s and 2x12s being the prime cuts. It’s as cheap as wood gets, yet every pile includes some wonderful boards, many almost knot-free and ideal for making fine furniture.
Start by looking for a pile of boards with a grade-stamp that says “S-DRY” and a grade number of 1 or 2 somewhere on each one. You’ll also need to pay attention to grain pattern. A first-rate, construction-grade furniture plank is largely free of knots, with growth rings oriented nearly perpendicular to the board face over most of its width. This grain orientation, called quartersawn or vertical-grained, minimizes seasonal wood movement and looks great. About half the wood you’ll find in lumberyard piles makes the grade for fine-furniture applications, with perhaps 25% being this kind of exceptional, vertical-grained stock. Not bad for wood that usually costs less than 80 cents per board foot!
The real trick with construction-grade wood is learning how to dry it. Even though S-DRY wood is kiln dried, it’s 16% to 19% moisture content is still way too wet for furniture. You’ll need to stack it in a heated, indoor space for several months to get it down to the required 6% to 8%. And winter is an excellent time for this because indoor humidity levels are so low. Space each layer of stacked wood, and speed wood-drying with an oscillating household fan pointed at the pile. Set it on low speed, and leave it on 24 hours a day. A hand-held moisture meter makes it easy to see how drying is progressing, though carefully measuring board widths each day works well, too. When board width stops shrinking (probably after two or three weeks under ideal conditions), your wood will be dry enough to begin work.
Although your lumber will be pretty dry at this stage, it’s still likely to misbehave as moisture is released from surfaces newly-exposed to the air. That’s why you’ll need to restack wood for more drying after each work session. Every time you expose new surfaces to the air, it encourages more drying that leads to shrinkage and twisting. Stacking isn’t a big deal, just something that needs to happen as you clean up after each work session.
As you start rough-cutting your construction-grade planks to length and width, keep in mind that the most precious wood you’ve got is the tight-grained areas, the ones with growth rings nearly perpendicular to the board face. Crosscut parts to rough length, then reserve sections of this prized wood for the most important areas of your project. Joint and edge-glue these into larger panels, then plane to final thickness.
About 10% of what you brought home probably has a very striking grain pattern made of light and dark growth rings. You can get the most out of this wood by slicing it into 1/4”-thick slabs, edge-gluing these together, planing them down to about 3/16”-thick, then gluing them to a solid wood substrate. Even if you don’t have a bandsaw you can still cut your own veneer like this on a tablesaw, using alternating passes across the blade. First rip the wood on-edge along one side, then flip it over and repeat on the next edge, with cuts meeting in the middle. Ordinary wood glue and lots of clamps do a great job securing veneer panels to drawer faces, cabinet tops and any other small, prominent surface.
Great wood and great prices available everywhere. That’s the raw material of a fabulous hobby that saves money, too. |
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