Preferred Rough Lumber Thickness
Greetings FWW Community,
I recently purchased a 14” bandsaw (Rikon 10-326), partly with hopes that the ability to re-saw would open afford more lumber options beyond 4/4. My question: do you have a preferred rough lumber thickness for stock you keep on hand in the shop? I realize this question is a truncated one, and the ever-present “it depends on…” response is obvious here. Even so, setting aside responses of that sort, and assuming that my projects extend to most solid-wood household furniture pieces (side tables, small boxes, blanket chests, etc.), do you have a thickness preference for that unassigned stock you have on hand in your shop? I’m asking because I’d like to know whether I could get a better yield out of one particular dimension over others.
Thanks!
Fledgling Woodworker
Replies
I too am only a beginner. My experience with some cherry 6/4, resawn for drawer faces, was sobering. The legs to a chest of drawer were essentially 6/4 with some finish reduction adn those , cut from one portion of the board were fine. When I went to resaw the remaining length of the board for some drawer faces, the resulting boards needed much more jointing and planning than I would have imagined. Until I get some better licks, my chant is now, "For any given project: Buy it as close to the final thickness as you can."
As a an admitted "beginner" I think your resaw experience stem more from techniques and possibly tool quality than the practicality of resawing. The OP mentions a Rikon bandsaw, while I tend to be skeptical of such brands I know it has a growing legion of followers. Since you don't mention your brand I will suggest you look at the blade, I use a Laguna 1" Resaw King and can slice usable 1/16" veneers on my Laguna 18BX bandsaw with ease. The fence and improper blade tension can also degrade the cut quality significantly when resawing if not properly adjusted. Do not give up but look for the causes of your earlier failures that is how your skills will grow.
For me, 3/4 finished thickness is too thin for a furniture carcase. I prefer something close to 7/8. That usually means buying 5/4, though some 4/4 is sawn thick enough to get almost 7/8 dressed.
My old crappy bandsaw was very poor at resawing. If I tried to resaw a finished 3/4 board in half, I'd end up with two 1/4 finished parts. There was just a lot of waste. My current saw is great at resawing, and I can get almost finished 1/16 parts right off the saw.
So, it really depends on what you are building, and the tools you have.
The other part of this is, I prefer to have less unused wood on hand. For years I worked around unused stacks of lumber, and it was just a pain. Life is better when I just buy wood as needed for a project.
My own experience and preferences go somewhat agin' yours:
I like to have planks as thick as I can get so they offer more opportunities for resawing the grain orientations I would prefer in the pieces cut for this bit of furniture or that. It can mean some wastage though.
The other thing I found over the years is that keeping timber stored for years before use, in an atmosphere similar to that in which a finished piece of furniture will reside, makes life far easier when it comes to dealing with the expansion & contraction of wood with change of atmosphere. Keeping it a long time in a house-like atmosphere makes a big difference to how stable it is when it comes to be cut into furniture parts.
Happily I was able to store all my timber collection in a former outhouse converted to a double-walled and insulated wood store inside the house. In addition, 90% of the wood I've ever used over 25 years (or thereabouts) was reclaimed and often came already dried to an near-ideal moisture content.
Wood from timber yards is often around 15% water content so takes a long time to come down to the ideal (for me) 11%, especially if it's thicker stuff. I tend to avoid it in favour of reclaimed stuff (which is also free, mostly).
It's also easier to find the less common timbers in reclaimed wood than it is to find such stuff in a timber yard. There's a ridiculous amount of extant furniture and 1st & 2nd finishing timber of high quality wasted in landfill or rebuilder's bonfire.
It makes me roll my eyes a bit when posters advise, "Keep your timber yard wood in the shop for 4 weeks before use, so it's dried out and become stable". Four months is the minimum really. With 12/4, four years would be better.
Lataxe
I'd love to have room for lots of wood storage. I just don't. And I spent a lot of time and energy working around it all. I'm a lot happier buying as needed.
Anything but 3/4"!! I see 3/4 and I think flatpack. Just reducing to 5/8 or going up to 1" makes a great visual change. Basic starting points are 5/4 & 8/4 when shopping primary woods, but like JC2 I have a bandsaw that will slice cardboard into paper.
With normal kiln dried stock resawing will pretty much always result in waste on the level JC2 described. Resawing from heavier and air dried stock has less waste because case hardening is not as much of a factor.
I use to buy lumber like you buy candy, pick nice lumber of different kind and thicknesses based on the uniqueness of each plank. I still have some of those in my wood pile, unused after 40 years. I now pride myself in planning each job so that I am left with almost no extra material. I can then use the exact wood fit for the job instead of finding a job that adapts to the wood I have and it keeps the wood pile manageable. Of course if I have a maple project and while choosing my wood I find a plank with lots of birds eye or ripples, I might add it to the total for one day make something out of it.
The only exceptions I make now are similar to yours. An unusually wide piece, or really nicely figured piece. Otherwise, if I don't need it, I don't buy it.
I prefer >8/4 rough stock if I think I going to need legs. But if I'm not I measure so that I know I will have at least 1" thickness after surfacing. I dont have a good resewing bandsaw, so I dont want to get too thick and waste time and wood planing it down.
I wouldn't buy thicker lumber with the thought of re sawing. It might save you money, but it's fraught with issues related to opening up the middle of the board. Potential for cupping & extra time needed to re-acclimate can be a negative.
That said, I do intentionally resaw for example drawer sides out of 5/4 or 4/4 (no sense in turning it into chips), material for bent laminations, or veneer, etc.
As a beginner, I would get a good carbide blade, tune up the bandsaw, and then resaw lots of scrap before cutting into that first thick piece of good hardwood.
I always try to get the widest, longest, thickest lumber I can afford to buy, store, and physically carry.
Endorsing @Lataxe's comments but I would add:
In NZ, I buy what the lumber yard has.
Selection is variable, but 25mm or 50mm is common. 40mm is sometimes all you can find... The only way to get thicker is to have it milled yourself or buy sleepers and dry them slowly.
I don't generally go to the trouble of reorienting the piece within a board, unless it's a table leg, but my work tends to be more rustic or needs to be as nice as possible without having waste wood to keep costs down. My target audience don't appreciate the difference and the boss is not willing to pay the price for it!
When I do have the choice though, I will pick thicknesses that are best for the project - if I need 18-22 mm I will buy 25 rather than 50 - I know how much the board will cup as it's already cut and the chances of having a useful off cut from a 50mm board is small. If I want a bookmatch though I'll go the extra distance.
I can see the advantage of having a 3 inch thick board and carving off pieces as required, and when I had some wood milled up it was done at 3 inches for this reason - I'll also get full 50mm thick slabs after surface finish is done too.
As for my wood hoard, I do occasionally buy a nice extra piece or two if there is just a good board. I do prefer 50mm for this as it offers more options, but wood I use often such as white oak I'll buy a few 1 inch boards if there's room in the budget.
When I first began woodworking I bought timber from lumber yards - three in all. All of them used air drying, no kiln drying, so case hardening wasn't something I ever experienced when cutting into the thicker stuff. One did have to wait 6 months to a year for the stuff to finish drying from 15% to 10-11%, though.
Even 25 years ago, timber from wood yards was an expensive part of woodworking. Since I wanted to give away what I made, to friends & family, I looked for alternatives. Happily I knew a number of blokes working in the various building trades, so I soon had an enormous amount of free wood or every kind, which they found and saved from bonfire or landfill.
A lot of this free wood came out of old buildings (typically Victorian but a few Georgian) that were being "refurbished". This often meant that fine old wood structures such as staircases, skirting, window frames, picture rails and so forth were ripped out to be replaced by veneered MDF or painted softwoods, as the internals of the old building were made into modern apartments or offices.
I noticed that the older stuff was of far superior quality to the great majority of stuff that could be bought in a typical timber yard (of the same species). Close-grained, heavy and (of course) very stable after 150 years in situ.
When I got ripped-out modern pieces of timber (50 years or less old) I soon came across case hardening effects - internal shakes and splits along with a tendency to warp when sliced - presumably due to the effects of kiln drying. The very modern exotic stuff (teak, southern yellow pine and the like) was also rather light and woolly - presumably fast-grown plantation stuff.
*******
In all events, the old-growth, stabilized-for-150 years reclaimed stuff turned me off timber yard woods for good. Think of the advantages of recalaimed wood: not only very high quality timbers, often in thicker sections, but also containing now rare exotics and (best of all for some) free. And the warping or other wood-wriggles many seem to see when cutting thicker timbers from timber yards never seem to bother me, with this old stuff.
You can also add the virtue (to be signaled as hard as you like) that the use of such timber is a fine and frugal way to stop consumer-waste; or even the likes of Bolshynabob from cutting down the Amazon forest so he can dig for more gold. :-)
Lataxe the frugal
Ha - if only.
The favoured construction woods in NZ were Rimu and Kauri as these were large and plentiful in the past.
It takes, I am told, about 300 years to grow a Rimu bug enough to have decent sized heartwood...
These days you can get managed felling heart rimu but it's easier to find in old floorboards and sarking from roofs.
Sadly, in NZ, the fashion for using reclaimed timber means the price of crap reclaimed stuff full of holes and sometimes beetle is more than the price of new lumber.
You can of course get some from demolitions, but doing so means a massive commitment to taking pretty much all of a houselot. I did that once and was well rewarded, but the de-nailing sucked.
Resawing? Check out Alex Snodgrass and one of his Tuning Your Bandsaw videos (if you haven't already done so). Extremely recommended.
Unlike most, I live on a farm in Wisconsin with 4' white oak that spontaneously fall and unlimited sawlog ash killed by EAB. I have as many as possible sawn on site to 8/4 and 6/4 quartersawn. Some I've had KD and milled. The walls of my shop are paneled with 3/4 T&G random width ash that I cut just outside the shop windows. But I have thousands of BF stickered and air drying. It dries from 25% down hto 9% surprisingly fast. It resaws well and works its way into tables and into wall cabinets with paneled doors. It needs to be acclimated in the heated shop only a few months. Other woods like walnut and cherry I buy KD at a local hardwood mill, at moisture percentages similar to that of my farm sawn, air dried.
The one thing most important to me for resawing is to have stable wood.
New kiln dried wood the same moisture content as the 3 yr old wood in my shop will not be as stable and tend to warp or bow a little.
There's something about wood that is several years old that makes it more stable, even at the same moisture content.
Most of the lumber I use has been inside my acclimated shop for more than
3 yrs., and it just keeps getting better.
I almost always buy 5 quarter. If it is very expensive I buy thinner boards if that will suit my needs.
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