Recently, I bought some reclaimed pine to build a sideboard – for Southerners. a huntboard. The wood is at least 100 years old and I’m sure a pine species from southeast TN or northern Al. Came out of a factory teardown.
I’ve started milling the wood and I am really pleased with the color, texture and workablility.
Here is the rub – I’m concerned about what appears to be high resin content of the wood. It planes slick as a button and I’m afraid that it will not glue properly.
Any comments or solutions?
JET of TN
Replies
Jet,
I just finished a large dining table of pitch pine - the generic name for those resinous pines including slash, loblolly, longleaf and shortleaf pine that grew profusely in the SW USA, until HM Navy (there were other, lesser consumers) cut them all down for resin, pitch, turpentine, tar and timber.
Is this what you have - basically orangey-yellow with a prominent distinction between the orange late, and yellow early, wood growth?
If you got an old beam out of a building (as I did for the table) you should find that the pine is dense (0.6 sp, gavity or thereabouts) with close-packed growth rings. Also, you should find that the resin has mostly crystalized, so that, for instance, the knots are very hard but there is no resin ooze.
The timber is wonderful stuff, the only real problem being a tendency to have shakes if the beam or whatever has been under load for a lot of years.
Edited 6/9/2006 12:24 pm ET by Lataxe
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I just finished a large dining table of pitch pine - the generic name for those resinous pines including slash, loblolly, longleaf and shortleaf pine that grew profusely in the SW USA, until HM Navy (there were other, lesser consumers) cut them all down for resin, pitch, turpentine, tar and timber.<
Congrats on the table, Lataxe.
I think you meant the SE USA. Pine still grows profusely here - I don't think HM Navy got it all. If you ascend in a helicopter over East Central Mississippi, West Alabama, it is amazing how much of the area is covered by mature Southern Yellow Pine (mostly longleaf pine here). You don't get a sense of it from travelling on roads. Most places, over 90 percent of the land is covered in pine forests. Not plantation pine - mature Southern pine growing in forests - at that nearly exact height that it reaches - 110 to 115 feet. We used to fly around the Navy base here at night (dark nights, too - those nights where I allowed the junior pilots to fly and caught up on my paperwork) in helicopters with our radar altimeters set at 200 feet, knowing that as long as we didn't fly into the television tower, we had every single pine tree for about a two hundred square mile area cleared by about 80 feet.
I had a tree cut down on my property after Hurricane Katrina that I counted 75 closely-spaced growth rings - there were more but I lost count and interest - it was nearly exactly 115 feet tall. Another one fell near the back of my house and crushed my multi-level deck - I have been busy rebuilding that. About 5 to 10 tons of SYP will cause familiarity to breed contempt. You or any other representatives of Her Majesty are welcome to any of my remaining trees. <G>
Jon Arno wrote a great article suggesting furniture possibilities for SYP in FWW 132, October 1998.
Ed,
You're right, I was thinking about the SE USA but it's so far away I got confused. <G>
It's very good to hear that there is still old growth pitch pine in quantity and I'm glad none of them treed you out the air. I've flown rather close to tree tops myself, albeit only in a glider. Scary enough for me.
I got the impression that there was only the plantation stuff available now. A friend owns a WW business making lots of one-off first and second finish items for owners of large old houses, some of which want pitch pine to match their existing old floors, architraves and so forth. He uses reclaimed pitch pine if he can get it but mostly buys plantation grown stuff (sold as yellow pine here) because he says he cannot get anything else form the timber merchant. I wonder if there's a logging quota or export restriction on the real stuff.....?
The plantation stuff is not a patch on the naturally grown timber, as I'm sure you know. It's half the specific gravity and sometimes dripping with resin. The early wood is also like cotton wool, as often as not.
The Arno article you mention was in the first FWW I ever read, on a holiday in Spain. I was so impressed I read the type of the pages. That was me an FWW fan forever.
Lataxe
Ps You can post me one of those hurrican-felled trees if you like. Please saw it into nice boards that the postman can carry. :-)
It will glueup without problems. The pieces I did were from river recovered long leaf pine. What I did was, glueup shortly after machining. The one problem you will encounter, this stuff eats sandpaper. The resins clog up sandpaper before it even gets worn. Went thru many sanding disks, if you're scraping or hand planeing shouldn't be a problem.
Southern Yellow Pine glue laminated beam manufacturers must laminate their lumber within 24 hours of milling for proper adhesion. They commonly use resorcinol for its waterproof properties. I would imagine using any adhesive would benefit from adhering to this 24 hour rule of thumb.
I did some work on a Welsh Chapel about 16 years ago - and as part payment took some of the timber. It was known in the UK as pitch pine - is actually SYP, high pitch content, dense, red-yellow, been in place for well over 100 years.
I made a prize-winning cabinet from the timber, a tambour-fronted small chest (which relied a lot on the integrity of the glue joints), used a conventional pvc glue, and the piece is sitting here in my living room, supporting a TV, as sound and solid as thje day it was made!
You'll have no problems!
Malcolm
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