Router Table Depot Blog: USE GREEN LUMBER (or kiln it yourself) Router Table Depot

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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Lumber purchased from a local sawmill can be had at a fraction of the cost of lumber purchased at a lumber yard. The simple process of “Googling” sawyers (or sawmills) in your local area will reveal a surprising number of sources of high quality green lumber in sizes and species that you are unlikely to find at the lumber yard (which generally specializes in construction grade lumber and maintains cabinetry grade stock only as a side business). Check with local mills to see what they have on hand and how much they charge per board foot. For example, in Florida, where Cherry sells at the lumber yard for about $7.00 a board foot and Oak is about $6.00 a board foot, the price for green lumber ranges from $.65 a board foot for Florida Pine to $2.00 a board foot for Cherry. In the case of Pine, the lumber can be air dried in a matter of a few months and for harder woods, a solar kiln can be built very inexpensively.

Another excellent means of obtaining good quality green stock involves the ancient technology of the “Froe”, a small piece of hardware that is used to split small, rough, shingle-like boards from a short log. By using a froe, lumber of the perfect size to build small boxes, chairs, turning stock, etc. can be had just by searching the local area for small discarded chunks of cut down trees. Stock can be made from palm trees, live oak, slash Pine, apple, pear, cherry and even dogwood and magnolia trees just by keeping ones eyes open for small, freshly cut logs in people’s front yards. It is an excellent way to experiment with woods that one simply will not find otherwise. The effort to use a froe is minimal and with a bit of practice one can make a significant amount of short stock out of pretty much any wood big enough to produce a board.

Many years ago, I was fortunate to live in a rural part of the country where forests were plentiful and every tenth farmer owned a portable sawmill. The cost of buying a small truckload of standing timber, having it moved to the portable mill and then either paying to have it sawed or splitting the lumber with the sawyer was relatively small. For example, I was able to buy a truckload of about 6000 board feet of timber consisting of a combination of White Pine, Ash, Black Cherry, Red oak and White Oak, with a couple of hard and soft Maple logs thrown in for just over six hundred dollars. For an additional three hundred dollars I hired a logger to cut the timber (I would NOT recommend anyone to cut trees themselves, it is very dangerous work) and haul it to the roadside and for two hundred and fifty dollars I hired a logging truck to transport it seven miles to a farmer with a portable sawmill. I split the lumber with the farmer and ended up with 3000 board foot of prime stock of multiple cuts, sizes and species for a total cost of less than twelve hundred dollars, or about forty cents a board foot. I built a small solar kiln for three hundred dollars and kiln-dried a third of the lumber and stickered the rest to let it air dry.

Used or construction grade lumber

It sounds a bit odd, but people have been reusing lumber from pallets, old barn boards, even dimensional building lumber for cabinetry for years. A good friend of mine routinely cuts old 2x4’s into stripping for bird houses, doll houses and small boxes. Such stock is generally soft wood (and thus amazingly easy to work) and can be had for very little money. The best part is that it can be used to experiment and develop new styles and techniques of cabinetry without a significant outlay of cash. If you are fortunate to live in an area where old barns are falling to the ground along the roadside (which would include a significant part of the country), it might well be worth stopping by and talking to the owner about reclaiming some of the lumber (it is wise to wait until the structure has actually fallen… usually the owner is happy to have you just haul the old boards off). The only caution I would make about reusing old barn boards is to run a strong magnet or metal detector over them before running them through a planer or using a roughing plane to reshape the surfaces. Once you have planed them a bit, you will be amazed at what superior lumber old barn boards can be, I am of the opinion that carpenters were far more “picky” about the stock they used a hundred years ago than people are today.

by: Router Table Depot

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