I’m sure that this has been discussed in the past, but lately I’ve caught snippets of wood salvage stories and advice in other posts.
Where have you found salvaged wood, and how have you recovered the treasure within the dirt, paint, etc.?
I justified my first planer (and spare set of blades) by paneling my basement with salvaged red cedar fence lumber.
Tom
Edited 1/8/2005 7:06 pm ET by tms
Replies
One day, while driving down a back road here in NH I nticed a butt end section of a sugar maple tree sitting by the side of the road. The butt end was 44" in dia and the thin end was 33" dia and the tree was 23' long. I called the owner of the property and , after giving him a song and a dance he said I could have it. I called a friend who has a wood mizer and he arranged to have a pulp truck pick it up. For 1/2 the wood my buddy agreed to cut up the tree and I am still using some of that wood 4 years later. I built my primary work bench out of it and I have made a couple chairs from it as well as a couple table tops. Beautiful wood; nothing like the kiln dried maple you get at the local hardwood dealer.
Wicked Decent Woodworks
Rochester NH
" If the women dont find you handsome, they should at least find you handy........yessa!"
Tms, This may sound odd, but I salvage the thin (1/8")ply
used on boxes of tangerines or tangelos
shipped from Spain or Portugal.
I make handy tool boxes complete with lock and key
using piano hinges and spaghetti pulls.
I leave their colorful brand names and logos on my handy work. Sewing kits, jigsaw tools, leather craft tools, and Dremel tool accessories come to mind. Steinmetz.
Get to know your local remodellers and house wreckers. Put an ad in your community newspaper. Keep in mind that free can sometimes be b___ expensive. I've noted it before here, but my approach for risky timber (floor boards, other heavily nailed boards) is to use a cheap TC blade and rip off a mm or so from the face (top) side to reveal the mischief beneath.
The attraction of recycled/salvaged timber is that it's sometimes no longer available commercially, and sometimes available in heroic dimensions (bridge beams of Australian ironbark for example). Sometimes its there for the taking away. There's lots around if you know where to look.
Malcolm
New Zealand | New Thinking
Edited 1/9/2005 4:32 am ET by kiwimac
Edited 1/9/2005 4:33 am ET by kiwimac
Steinmetz,
What is a spaghetti pull ??...and wouldn't elbow macaroni provide a better grip..??...lol. Of course, there are those left over crusts from Pepe's...:)))
BG,Spaghetti pull is a type of drawer or cabinet pull made from 1/4" rod bent with two radioused leg ends each of which are threaded for screws for attachment to doors/drawers/ Comes in brass, chrome and many other finishes .
Sizes: 3-1/2", 4", 4-1/2" & 6"
(Available in decorator hardware dept..) On the other hand there's linguine pulls ,(With white or red clam sauce)Edited 1/9/2005 10:25 am ET by Steinmetz
Edited 1/9/2005 10:29 am ET by steinmetz
Like this?http://www.newenglandlab.com/stainlesswire-400.jpgWire pull is the name I used to find this with Google.
I started a small remodel job in Dec. . Building a new store front for a local shop owner . We had to tear off all of the old in order to reframe for the new windows and doors. The first thing I noticed was all the trim was made out of copper (mine) I thought ,second thing was when we started tearing off the wood from when the store was remuddled last (1950's) was leaded glass windows (better ask about these) I asked the owner and she told me they were mine. When the glass company showed up to remove the old glass for disposal they simply took down the leaded panels and stacked them in the back of my truck between sheets of ridged foam. So now sitting in my shop are 2 panels that are 9'x3'6" and 5 panels that are 3'x3'6". Also a very nice pile of copper moldings. If I had not taken them they would be in landfill as we type. Rick
Ad, I once removed about fifteen solid brass tellers window grilles from a union hall's renovation. Kept them stacked up alongside a shed to aquire a "Patina"
After about 15 years, my darling wife tossed them in thetrash and never mentioned it. Five years later, I needed them for a job requiring grilles in about ten doors. BUMMER! That's what I get for making her do the yard work all those yearsShe had grown tired of moving them so she could mow the #$%^&* grass
Stein (Coudda bin a contenda)Metz
Busting a great piece of woodwork out of some trash is one of the purest pleasures in woodworking! When I lived in the UK, in mid Wales, I haunted the local auctions. Sometimes I could buy great big Edwardian dressers and wardrobes that no-one could fit into a modern home for 10 or 15 pounds. Some were made of oak, but I also scored black walnut (imported from the US), southern yellow pine, and poplar ... and on one memorable occasion, cuban mahogany! Oh Joy. Those were the days.
MalcolmNew Zealand | New Thinking
Unk, Wire/Schmire! Don't forget, I used the vernacular of the 60's
Most cabinet hdwe had their Quaint names at wholesale hardware supply houses. Elbow catch/ cane bolt/ flush bolt (No! not plumbing supplies)
Bow handles/ Bail grips /
Where did you find that neat photo of the wire pull?Diner dialog: "Rasputin"......Rice pudding
"Sweep the kitchen"......Corned beef hash
"S O S"...............Ask any service man.Steinmetz
>> Where did you find that neat photo of the wire pull?Google image search. I search for pictures all the time. It's often much easier than trying to explain something. (Not that I'm saying you did a bad job explaining spaghetti pulls.)http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&ie=UTF-8
Unk, I can tell sarcasm when I see it I use THAT link instead of spellcheck
It's faster and polite as well.
Example: " Did you mean to say Sarcasm?"
>> I can tell sarcasm when I see itI emphatically deny that anything in my message was intended as sarcasm. I was speaking strictly of my own difficulty (or reluctance) in explaining things. I'm sorry you took it as an offense.
Dunc......you have never failed to explain anything I heve ever seen in anything less than the most eloquent of terms. Wicked Decent Woodworks
Rochester NH
" If the women dont find you handsome, they should at least find you handy........yessa!"
Thank you kindly. But that's partly because when it gets ugly I give up and post a picture. :)
Unk, No! no offence in fact I was laughing
my self sick when I opened the link you provided.Google and I are old friends We visit often.
My Grandson holds stock in "GOOG"
It was I who indulged in sarcasm and I appoligizeAfter seeing too many members requesting information
that can easily be googled up,
I often think some guys are too lazy
and would rather 'let George do it'Stein.
I lived for a time on the Romney Marsh in Kent and used to take my LandRover down on the shore beachcombing.
A freighter in the Channel lost its deck cargo of sapele, meranti and keruin and I WAS THERE!!
IanDG
went by a skid mfg plant and saw bins full of short pieces of wood we asked if we could have some for fire wood for our fireplace
turned out to be oak & cherry they were using to build skids
we found out who the supplier was and did a tour of the plant also bought 200 bd ft of select for spring delivery
we now burn oak & cherry in our fireplace for the coust of hauling it home
skid people pay 900 a dumpster load to get rid of it (it costs 100 a face cord here to buy hardwood firewood ) only in Canada as they say
I live near a board of education dump site. Picked up a 4'x4' x2" maple work bench from an old school work shop that was garbage. The type with swing out seats for the kids to sit on. Asked the man and he said if I could get it out of the bin, it was mine. Didn't take me long to get my son to help. Belt sanded the top an put a plug in a drill hole. Now have a great beanch to work on that was someones garbage. Life can be fun.
Local pallet company is about 10 miles. They charged $40 for a dumptruck load of cut offs. 2/3ds oak, 1/3 misc hardwoods, all dry. Nearly 1.5 cords in all.
Stacking it was a little like brick masonry.
what part of Canada are we talking Eh.
near ottawa
my husband has unlimited access to skids and we use them for the same thing. i use a chainsaw to cut them up with tho. i'm looking for ideas that i can make things with out of some of the nicer ones tho. some have beautiful pieces, even the 2x4's are great.
I agree with you that skids and pallets do have some very nice wood in them if you have the patience to carefully disassemble and mill to usable wood. Here's a 36' x 36' coffee table I made out of re claimed pallet wood.
I found a cheaper and better way to get wood!
Go visit your local sawmill.. At mine I can get a pickup load of wood for $20.00.
it doesn't matter what type, cherry maple, black walnut etc.. it's all $20.00
now the problem is I get the "thins" You see mother nature doesn't make all trees exactly 12 inches, some are 12 3/4 some are 12 15/16ths some are 12 3/8 or 12 1/2
Thus I get the boards that are 15/16ths or 3/4 or 1/2 well you get the idea, some boards are 12 inches wide and some are 4 inches wide. all are at least 8 feet 6 inches long..
I air dry everything and sort according thickness and then according to width..
If I'm carefull I can still wind up with a 3/4 thick board from a 15/16ths and anything less I tend to plane to 1/2 inch thickness.. The really thin stuff I use as plywood I'll glue two or more boards together to get a thick enough one if all I have showing is the face..
Lived on both coasts in former lives. There I frequented the dumpsters in new upscale house divisions. You can tell when the trim teams come through. Also carted wood from wherever I happened to be traveling to then current residence. Bought a farm in the midwest. The corn crib framing (mixed oak, hickory, basswood, soft maple, etc.), walnut siding, fir rafters and shiplap bin walls became part of a house remodel and barn reconstruction. The best find was a couple of pieces of tree root salvaged from a clay layer in a slip bank of the local river, 160' below the surface. Likely to be >30k BP based on location. Will take radiocarbon dating to know for sure. Pen blanks maybe?
"Likely to be >30k BP based on location. Will take radiocarbon dating to know for sure."
???
">30k BP"? This refers to a date/age? I'm sure the answer will occur to me one second after I hit the 'Post' button - but till then, to what is this referring?
Thanks,
Clay
">30k BP"?
More than 30,000 years before present - the man's a paleontologist!
Malcolm(who really was once a paleontologist - well, nearly)
New Zealand | New Thinking
Edited 1/10/2005 3:37 pm ET by kiwimac
Wouldn't that more correctly be, "paleobotanist"? or paleobeachcomber? lol.Tom
They all got it right - Before Present. For the others, beachcomber with a half remodeled barn full of using tools who is not afraid to ask "dumb" questions might be close. But in this case, beach is a strange little river in the Midwest that formed underneath a stagnant glacier. So instead of spreading out across the landscape like a prairie river usually does, it eroded down through the glacial till until it hit bedrock. Consequently, the river has a couple of actively eroding slipbanks. Trees and shrubs can't grow on an active slipbank because natural bank erosion is too fast. So any embedded wood has to be old. This wood was in a clay layer which kept it wet and kept oxygen away. I just happened to be there when natural erosion exposed it. But the old adage - luck is made - had been watching this bank for a few years.
That stuff is the ultimate salvaged timber, right?
Here in New Zealand, native kauri is still excavated from peat bogs in the North Island - you may have seen it advertised in FWW. The logs can be really heroic in dimension. In the UK, bog oak is well known. There's a fisherman in the South Island's oceanic fjords who has a department of conservation license to salvage floaters - native logs washed off the steep (national park) slopes, and he mills southern beech, rimu and totara, among others - all specimen timbers.
MalcolmNew Zealand | New Thinking
Tracked the site down when I was trying to figure things out. Neat wood.
TMS -
This doesn't have much to do with Fine Woodworking but with respect to salvage ....
A couple years ago a friend replaced a fence alongside her yard. Knowing what a scrounge I am she asked if I would like the moldy old cedar fence boards. But of course ...
So what am I going to do with two truckloads of weathered moss covered 1x6 cedar planks?
My son introduced me to barbequing salmon on cedar planks. He buys his at the grocery store for like $5.00 or something for two or three. Sending a few of the more straight grained somewhat knot free fence boards through the planer and I have a pile of salmon roasting planks for myself and gifts for friends.
Looking for ways to finish the exterior of my new shop it dawned on me that these fence boards, although rather short for such a purpose would result in a nice look .... so another whole bunch became siding for the gable ends of the shop.
For the rest of the shop sidewalls we salvaged a huge pile of thick hand split cedar shakes when we had our new roof installed. My wife, bless her heart, spent the better part of last summer removing nails and sorting them out into neatly stacked piles. Now I've got shingled sidwalls on my shop!
In the cosmic order of things, it's not much but I suspect we kept close to six yards of trash out of a land fill somewhere.
From Beautiful Skagit Co. Wa.
Dennis
Yea, I love those old fence boards. I put v-groove ship lap joints on my old 5/8" redwood and it became siding for the new garden shed. The 50 year old 1" redwood from my parents fence is all jointed and planed into mostly 3/4" boards - about 500 bd ft - that I will be using for a a variety of projects, including new bifold garage doors to replace the roll-up door. Boy, is that old wood pretty - doesn't grow like that any more! Of course, being kinda short there will be some design challenges, but the price was right. And I only nicked one set of jointer blades - LOL.
I came of age -- from a woodworking point of view -- in NYC. Wednesday was "furniture night" in Manhattan. Anyone with stuff to throw out dragged it to the sidewalk, and you could not imagine the stuff that was available -- I still have bench with a top that was salvaged from a large walnut desk. Here in MN, some of the best salvage opportunities come from houses or buildings that are about to be demolished. There are a few outfits here who will pay the owner to go in and strip out anything of value -- fixtures, doors, casings etc. -- but often times owners are not organized enough to think about such opportunities. So, sometimes if you just track down the responsible party, they will give you carte blanche to take what you want. For this type of thing, you must get the word out of your interest and keep your ear close to the ground.A professor friend on mine told me a local college was going to demo 3 old houses near their campus for an expansion. We got permission to poke around, and to my amazement, one of the houses was fitted out with QS white oak casings, book shelves, doors. And none of it had been painted. Another time, a friend told me a neighbor was about to demolish their old deck. Turns out it was all construction heart redwood mostly in 2X 6 material (something you cannot even buy around here anymore). They were happy to let us tear it apart, and even paid the dump charge for stuff we could not use. So salvaging wood is well worth the effort, since much of this stuff is old growth material and far superior to the stuff that is commonly available today.
On a remodel project a few years ago we took out an old wooden hot tub. About 5' across. All, and I mean ALL the wood was clear redwood heartwood. Most if not all was very straight grained. I asked "Where do you want me to stack this stuff?" .... "In the dumpster" was the reply. I almost fainted.Made a countertop for the wife's laundry sink/cabinet, duckboards for the utility shower .... several other items. Sadly it's about all used up now but at least its found a good home............
From Beautiful Skagit Co. Wa.
Dennis
As has been said, "finding a source of free wood that someone else is trashing is a joy indeed" My sources are critical as here in Alaska we don't have access to the suppliers in the lower 48 or as we call it "outside". Two of my favorite for foundation wood and shop projects is the local glass warehouse. Tons and tons of southern pine, 2x 4's, 6's, sheets of 1/4" masonite [great drawer bottoms] etc: Another is the local manufacturer of commercial cabinetry and business furniture. all kinds of good 5/4 & 4/4 MDF finished on both sides. If you want absolute straight, stable MDF for jigs, sacrifical fences, etc: this is the stuff. Here's a coffee table made from salvage oak pallets and an MDF base [nothing lightweight with this baby]. Keep on scrounging, we need to save money on wood so we can buy more tools. By the way, next time the mrs. chides you about all your tools, march her into the kitchen, open a drawer and ask her when was the last time she used that 'melon baller' or the hardboiled egg slicer! Count to ten at the days end.
No real scores in the wood department, but I did pull Dumpster Sally out of a dumpster. Sally is an ancient Skil 8.25. I put a new cord on it. Works like a champ, but ya don't want to use it one handed, esp over your head!
I am constantly amazed at the stuff I find.
I have $20,000 worth of wood working equipment that I bought for $1800 because it was abandoned outside. I had to refurbish and repaint the equipment but I now have:
- a 14" 5hp Rockwell table saw,
- a 20" 3hp variable speed dual transmission Rockwell band saw
- a 16" 7.5 hp Rockwell radial arm saw.
To date I have pulled from the dumpster:
- material for two 7' x 7' x 14' Wood storage sheds that I have built-doors included.
- a large 104 inch x 6 inch belt sander from the garbage
- at least 1500 bd/ft of "mahogany" in 6" x 1" x 7ft boards
- a professional stainless steel coffee maker worth $500(it works)
- assorted electrical motors.
- a double steel door with steel jamb and closers
- piles of 2 x 8 x 8ft construction material
Every so often I build another shed to justify/store my collection of "good junk"
Sometimes I wonder whether I collect stuff to build, or build to collect stuff?
Cheers
M.Stehelin
"Sometimes I wonder whether I collect stuff to build, or build to collect stuff?"I often feel the same way about my shop. ie. Do I have a shop for woodworking, or do I use woodworking in order to have a shop? Seriously, sometimes I feel a slave to shop improvement. Someday, I hope to get back to woodworking.In the "fortune favors the prepared" department: I recently justified the cost of converting my shop to 3Ø power, by salvaging a 5HP, 17.5 CFM @ 175PSI air compressor.TomPS. I originally started this thread in hopes of gleaning some new ideas for picking up salvage wood, but the wide range of scrounges out there is equally interesting.
> ....I originally started this thread in hopes of gleaning some new ideas for picking up salvage wood, but the wide range of scrounges out there is equally interesting.
I like to make 'stuff' out of metal as well as wood. In search of 'raw materials' I happened by a local tractor dealer asking about the wood pallets the Kubota's were shipped on. I'd been told they were made out of mahogany or other good stuff. Come to find out the factory now ships all their tractors on metal skids rather than wood.Yep - I hauled off as much rectangular steel tubed skids as I could pile onto my 14' car trailer. ...........
From Beautiful Skagit Co. Wa.
Dennis
Dennis, I also 'scrounge' metal when available Too bad you don't live here in Connecticut. I hate to give away my secret sources, but for anyone in New England
with time to kill get yourself to Pratt and Whitney's Surplus StoreAcres and acres of stuff at bargain prices. also Free usable wood if you don't mind extracting a few nails They are located on Silver lane in East Hartford
Open on Tuesdays ,Thursdays and Saturdays
8AM to 3:30 PM
inventory changes mostly everycouple of days
The free wood is open all week (Out doors)Machinists, can you say CARBIDE?Computers, laptops,keypads mice, cables, office furniture ,free coffee. even toys for the kiddies. O K, the secret's out Steinmetz Canadians welcome
While I'm sure the PW surplus yard is a gold mine, I think that I can trump that with the Boeing Aircraft Co. surplus yard. It's a poorly kept secret about 15mile south of Seattle. I have to limit myself to about one visit annually.Back to salvaged lumber: Today I just made a deal with one of the local tree service companies to call me whenever they have sound hardwood 10" dia. x 6' long or larger. They even offered to deliver! Maple, chestnut, holly, poplar, black locust, and the occasional sycamore, are the major hardwood components of Seattle's urban forest. There are also various softwoods, but believe it or not I had to become somewhat selective.Tom
M -I set about to organize my storage cabinets the other day. About 2/3 through the process I realized I was building shelves, drawers and trays to hold the stuff I *had* not what I *needed*.You're not alone in this, my friend! (grin)
...........
From Beautiful Skagit Co. Wa.
Dennis
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