I've been looking for a new front door and I've perhaps been too fussy about acquiring a hardwood one over pine. But I've seen a pine front door on ebay. It measures 208cm x 86cm which is taller than standard and 45mm thick. At the risk of sounding like an idiot. Do those measurements suggest a cheap door that might warp?
I suppose..a better question. With pine doors, what characterizes them as not cheaply made?
Give us the EBay link. "Pine" can mean anything from fast grown in Chile or South Africa to top quality from Finland etc. Huge difference in raw material price.
The pine. Even good quality pine won't be as weather resistant as hardwood. Cheap pine doors use cheap pine. Good quality pine would probably end up not far short of cheap hardwood so no point in using it.
A £50 door is worth £50. A £300 door is £300 quids worth.
There are two sorts of pine. Joinery quality was once called red pine and was made with the various species that would absorb preservative (or water, come to that.)
White pine, on the other hand, is pretty impervious and the finish on the wood is not as good.
These days people will buy and sell any old crap (including illegally logged tropical woods which at least one large firm in Scandinavia is supplying the UK with.)
Either way, the door will need painting after it has been treatd with preservative. I don't know much about modern preservatives but in the good old days when we all used tabun derivatives, you had to leave the preservative at least two days before painting.
That was because the preservative could react with the paint. Of course in those days you could still get lead based primer so need not bother with preservatives.
Along with species, joinery grade timber has no knots -or if there are knots in it, they are of a certain nature not deemed defective enough to mar the work. Search for "grading timber" for lists of quality control.
I have actually seen veneered blanks edged with real pine -and knots in the real pine. Bloody hell what tossers. Never trust a man wearing a suit or a uniform.
European Redwood is the species and the price/quality depends on how far north it was grown. Finland and Siberia produce the best, but you don't see that in the average merchant. At the other end of the scale, the UK grown stuff is used mainly for pallets. Most respectable merchants will stock something in between
European Whitewood is the Xmas tree, strictly speaking a spruce. The better grades are virtually knot free, but it machines badly, which mainly restricts its use to flooring. Said to be more stable than redwood. The shrink wrapped stuff in the sheds appears to be neither of these, possibly some kind of hybrid species grown on the equator.
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