They're starting to dry and cracking badly, cracking from outer edges runni ng partway toward the centre. I take it the outer wood is drying faster tha n the inner. How can I stop them cracking?
Useful stuff to know. Were moving it all to slow drying down, hopefully the rest will be ok. It was cut 3 weeks ago. Cheers.
NT
No the rest will simply take longer to crack
We're going to PEG some too.
NT
Scaffold planks are normally whitewood. Technically more stable than the usual redwood, but impossible to get a decent finish on. Blunts cutters and gums up abrasive cloth. I was once sent a sample of fast grown 8"x 1" redwood from the Scottish borders somewhere that was as dry as a bone and flat as a pancake. Failing that, try and find some Finnish stuff or a discarded Ikea headboard where the wider 1" sections are actually superb quality. I hauled one out of the council wood bin at the tip this morning :-)
Or contact specialist timber suppliers.
The sort that actually saw up logs and season them.
Yes, but this is sort-of the point. I can go to a specialist timber supplier who will saw up logs, season them and charge me mightily for doing so. Or I can find everyday stuff being sold at an everyday price and pick out the planks that are special to me and store and season them myself. I've still got enough mahogany(see above) and rosewood (odd offcut billets that I resawed) and even a board of ebony that just turned up in bargain bin in a timber yard but I've running short of softwood.
Nick
It's almost worth buying a new Ikea headboard if the wood's really good. But recycled timber is excellent for small scale work like mine. I made a number of instruments out of solid mahogany counters from the local bank when they chucked the stuff out after a refit. It was actually my bank branch and they offered it to me - I didn't have to pinch it!
Nick
There are different weights of PEG, I suppose to do with the extent of the polymerisation.
Anyway the wood remains full of the peg solution so is heavy.
AJH
Yes, chain length. We're getting PEG 1000.
NT
I imagine, being Swedish, Ikea have their own sawmill where every stage of the timber preparation can be planned to end up with furniture quality redwood. No use to the typical UK timber merchants where outdoor durability is more of an issue (windows etc) but essential for furniture going into a centrally heated home. Secondary kilning, as practised by some of the bigger UK merchants doesn't work well for softwood, so there's no option but to buy directly from Sweden/Finland if you want sub 10% moisture content. The panels in solid pine kitchen doors are remarkably thin and flat and dry.....even from MFI etc
I would expect your best bet would simply be to trawl through a few DIY sheds or builder's merchants, and sort through what they have until you find a good one.
OOI, what do you use the softwood for?
Sounds like musical instruments to me.
Rosewood and ebony for fingerboards. Mahogany for necks although I prefer maple.
Bodies are often fruit wood, but sometimes softwoods (evergreens pine/spruce/larch/fir etc etc).
The problem is no one grows softwoods for 'woodwork' - it's all structural lumber and as such the quality is poor and the cost is low.
Sometimes parana pine has been used for finer work, Douglas fir and cedar a little, but that's it.
Softwood is too unstable generally to be useful beyond structural work, where a mm of movement goes unnoticed.
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