I have never worked with poplar. I got my hands on nice rough poplar board at a yard sale. My wife had two large maps that needed custom frames. I milled the poplar into the parts needed. The wood was great to work with. I researched what finish might look good on them, experimented with a few things, and finally used a couple of coats ofTung Oil.
I'm not sure how they'll look after they age...but right now they look terrific. If I can figure out how to post a pic, I will.
Frank
Then steer well clear from such goodies as koa, teak...even walnut.
BTW, one doesn't *have* to buy F&S (or "Select")...#1 common works well for many, many things.
About five years -- but so's the photo. The poplar one isn't quite as bright green any more as it was when the photo was taken, but it's by *no* means brown.
Bingo.
Look for ash. It is cheaper than oak, even more heavily figured. Hard, durable--used for shovel handles, among other things.
Poplar is a great secondary wood, as Doug Miller explained, and around here you see literally hundreds of new and antique dough bowls carved from it, along with a lot of other things. I used it for siding on my shop--rough cut, put up as board and batten, no finish, about '95, and still doing fine as it ages. It is not a weather or ground durable wood, though, so such use must be vertical and off the ground.
Some poplar that is grown in heavily mineralized ground will show deep purple to dark green to black figures when freshly cut. Unfortunately, that fades fairly quickly...much to my disgust when I first found that out a couple decades or so ago.
If you're not in a rush, consider buying your wood green and rough and jointing and planing it after a year or so. Once you amortize the jointer and planer, you save about 40% of the wood cost, and have an incredible amount of garden mulch...or compost if you prefer. Rough green wood costs around here have risen dramatically in the past couple years, with oak now running out close to a buck a board foot. I think poplar is still about half that.
Aspen may be nearly impossible to find in the East.
I've used poplar for molding to be painted and stained. Works exceptionally well, cuts easily when going through the knives, with just a tiny amount of fussing, no burning, nice, clean almost ready to use product. Making frames from that would be a snap.
I get my Aspen from Menard's. Each board is individually sealed in plastic wrap. All the boards I have bought have be straight as an arrow. I use it for face frames and have never had a problem with it. Check it out when you go to Menard's.
Around here (Pacific Northwest) birch is usually the same or lower cost than poplar. It's a harder wood and I use it for drawers and sometimes for visible parts. I like the combination of brown heartwood and white sapwood.
At my favorite Connecticut dealer, aspen is $2.75 bd/ft, poplar is $2.30.
Doesn't the plastic wrap interfere with the finish? ;) Sorry, couldn't help myself.
But I've seen Borg plastic wrapped glued up panels that cupped like crazy once the plastic came off.
-Leuf
I was doing some research on some burl pen blanks I have last night and ran across a page that claimed that Gmelina is used for matchsticks.
WAY fast growing tree.
Bill
Suppose they might use anything now, wooden matches being a rarity. Don't even use cedar for pencils either. Reason for aspen and such lies in the fact that the burned chunk doesn't break off as easily as other hardwoods. Look at the breaks you see in hardwood coals in you stove. Poplar sort of flashes into stringy black, with the shape of the log often pretty evident in the fluff.
Neat stuff, used in the east as bottoms for stoneboats and buckboards, because it'd dent rather than crack when you pitch stuff on it. Used in the UP for the bottoms of Finns, because it won't get splinters in their butts in the sauna, and feels cool.
"Eigenvector" wrote That sucks, I need a hardwood and one with some character to it. I was noticing that it was extraordinarily plain looking wood. To be honest I noticed the same thing about maple, no real character to the grain. As for oak, tons of character - probably why it costs oodles of money. I think I also saw hemlock in the mix, but I was under the impression that hemlock is a softwood more suited for framing than furniture.
What about Hickory? Kate
What's Menard's? You won't find it in this area of Virginia. I'm reasonably sure Woodcraft can order it in for you at one of its stores, but...heh, boy, the price. Tulip poplar sells for about $1.75- $2.50 a bf here (not in Lowe's or HD), so plastic wrapped boards from elsewhere aren't going to go over big, particularly since tulip poplar is available in straight, wide knot free boards that almost never cup or warp.
Big-box home improvement retailer, similar to Lowe's and Home Depot. They're in the upper Midwest only. Most of the stores are in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Indiana.
Closest one to you looks like central Ohio:
11:18 pm, "Dave" wrote:
Good to hear from you, my friend. What have you been doing with yourself? mahalo, jo4hn
With a spray gun and some work, poplar can be anything you want it to be, including cherry...
Start reading up on tinting,toning,etc,etc in the finishing books. A spray outfit is a requirement to make poplar a much prettier wood than you ever thought.
Ask "Nailshooter" , I th> I'm pricing out oak and getting depressed about the high cost, so I'm
I love poplar. Seriously. We were just talking about it at work today. It mills like a dream, is inexpensive and with a little experimentation can be made to look like any number of different woods. And for paint, well, don't look any further than poplar. Did I mention that it mills like a dream? I've had it up to my eyeballs with Doug Fir splintering out and into my flesh. It gives new meaning to "breaking the edge".
JP
Two years ago, I made a book stand for a daughter to use in here classroom. I made it out of poplar and finished it with wipe on poly. I saw it the other day and it has lost all of the green and is a nice honey brown color.
I made a bed for another daughter with poplar and stained it brown with a water stain. It has a nice furniture appearance.
I like it better than red oak, but then I like most any wood better than red oak. :-)
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