Halp! Can't find 12/4 for legs...

My next "design" calls for square legs 2 1/2" with a steeeeeeeeeeeeep taper over their 35" length.

I'll be dipped in doo-doo if I can find 12/4 *anything* here in Denver.

Does anyone have a tip/tiplet for making these legs out of a something else? I'm crappy @ veneering, so I'm unlikely to go there... When I glue together

4/4 stock or 8/4 stock the seam is very visible - and this table is going to be in a prominent location, so I'm not thrilled about that either...

What do you guys do when you need something that works like 12/4 but can't find it? Or maybe I should just turn off the shop lights and go in to read the new issue of FWW.

Reply to
patrick conroy
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there are a ton of mail-order wood suppliers

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which will have it.

I'm curious why you have such a tough time gluing up wood blocks. Do you edge glue successfully? It shouldn't be any different. If you match the grain carefully, you'll be fine.

I was in a similar situation and needed 3" square stock to use for some bed posts (also tapered as in your case). I glued up 3 pieces of 1" or so thick hard maple. The grain in hard maple (not figured) is pretty mild, so it wasn't too tough to get a good match and the glue lines were nearly invisible.

At any rate, I'm sure you can find the wood online if you decide not to glue it up.

Mike

Reply to
Mike in Mystic

You might check with Sears-Trostel in Fort Collins. I "think" I saw

12/4 material there recently, although I can't swear to it. See
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for contact/location info.

--mike

Reply to
emelbee

This is a _very_ common problem when you work with quarter sawn white oak as you simply won't find 12/4 stock because of the way it dries ... or doesn't dry.

I have fabricated legs up to 4" out of 8/4 QSWO with careful matching of grain. Except for the taper in your case, another method to consider might be the old Stickley technique where each leg is made from four triangular pieces glued together so that all four faces of the leg show the typical ray flecks of QSWO.

With the radical taper, your best bet will likely be a glue-up with careful matching of the grain, or back to the idea of a thicker veneer ... it can be done.

Reply to
Swingman

Take a look here. It may be cheaper to buy the legs already made than to buy the wood.

Reply to
Leon

So use flatsawn, saw squares out of it, and rotate them. You have to pick your boards, but it's good enough for jazz.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

What timber ? Are you chasing quartersawn figure ?

Laminate them. A good glue line should be invisible.

Laminate them. Do it symmetrically and reed either down the glue line, or on either side of it.

Build the leg out of four sides and a lock mitre joint. This is how L&JG Stickley used to do it to put quaertersawn on all four sides. It _ought_ to work on a taper too, if you shim the stock as it goes through the moulder -- I'd run a test piece first.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

Since you did not list a wood type: HD has 4" fence post that will plane down nicely to 12/4. I normally glue up 8/4 and then plane to size; no problem with seams showing. If you can give a little on the size; Austin Hardwoods does stock some 10/4 (or did).

Reply to
Alan Bierbaum

each leg 4 pieces, mitered at the corners.

Reply to
bridger

Not really more advantageous with regard to thickness than doing it out of

8/4 in the first place, IME. Actually, and in a pinch, I've ripped 8" wide 5/4 flatsawn stock into 1" wide pieces, turned the pieces 90 degrees on edge and glued them back together, ending up with something that is now, for all practical purposes, quartersawn.

The point is still the same, you must come up with a workaround since, like the OP, you won't find 12/4 stock in that wood.

Reply to
Swingman

I already have 3" oak - both flat and quartered. There's no problem in producing the stuff, although it does command top dollar, especially the QS.

For squares, I can get sizes up to 3"x4" off the shelf and not pay too much for it (3x4 is about twice the cube price I pay for 1" boards). If I can cope with it still being rather green, I can have 12" square and bigger from the timber framing guy, and it's even cheaper (although if I'm buying by the truckload, I should hope so too)

Reply to
Andy Dingley

White oak? I have never seen, or even heard of, there being 12/4 quartersawn white oak anywhere in this part of the world, whatsoever.

It is just something you will not find for sale at any price. Lumber dealers will tell you it is because they can't dry it at that thickness with any degree of sucess. Granted, I've never tried to dry it myself, but that is the story I've heard for the past 40 years or longer as to why you don't see it for sale.

For a country without a lot of hardwood forest left, you do have some beautiful wood available. AAMOF, from what I've seen, the mother lode of seasoned QS white oak is still in the UK ... in furniture, churches, museums, on walls, as wainscotting, ad infinitum. Besides the ubiquitous "mahogany" of various species, you guys must have traded in it extensively during colonial days.

Reply to
Swingman

Have you looked at Talarico Hardwoods? He specializes in old growth quartered Oak. Shows 16/4 on the site.

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Reply to
Jim Polaski

Cherry or mahogany is at the top of the list... Nope.

:) Thanks... Another technique I need to work at. My last lamination was pretty "sucky"... I think the seam was tight, but the two boards were different enough to make the technique quite apparent.

Reply to
patrick conroy

Thanks Mike. It's a drive but might be worth a look! Much appreciated!

Reply to
patrick conroy

10/4 would be fine. I'd go back to 2". I was just there @ Austin and didn't see anything. In fact, almost everythign was 4/4. Maybe I'm not looking in the right warehouse???

I stopped at Centennial and they had good prices on 8/4. Paxton had some 12/4 Cherry today but the selection was pretty limited at it was $11/bf...

Reply to
patrick conroy

Andy Dingley wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Somebody did a magazine article on this. While I remember reading it in the last six months, there is no telling when it was published. Woodsmith, maybe?

That's the problem with having access to a great library. ;-)

Patriarch

Reply to
patriarch

We have zero hardwood forest available for cutting. There are only a handful (literally - I could probably name them) hardwood forests left, and these are strictly hands-off. There are, if anything, too many softwood forests around - these are rigid grid-planted foreign-species softwood plantations, built post-war by the Forestry Commission to keep us in pit-props during wartime. Fortunately they've switched their planting strategy these days.

If you want oaks to fell, then it's nearly all singletons on farmland. Maybe a few small stands of trees, but there really isn't an "oak forest" you could go and take a chainsaw to. Beech woodland and ash coppice is still rather more common.

Most of our oak these days is French though. I don't know where or why, but the French seem to be clear-cutting the stuff like crazy.

We also have imported American oak - white, and a bit of red. I suspect we're just getting the low-grade stuff though.

For finished work, then quite possibly so. Oak really is "the English timber". If you ever get the chance, visit a house like Rufford Hall, Moreton, or Bristol's Red Lodge. A timber framed house in oak, panelled throughout in oak and furnished in oak.

Wainscotting was never oak. Panelling - often linenfold carved for the best work - was in oak, but the notion of "wainscotting" really marks the end of the "age of oak". It was made in deal softwood, as part of a major shift in interior decorating styles (I'd suggest James Ayres "Domestic Interiors" for an excellent history of such things)

I don't think we ever traded oak too much - we've always been importers of timber, rather than exporters. It was Nelson's Navy who used most of it, but we didn't sell the stuff.

In my nearby city of Bath there's a visible shift from the rustic poverty of the 17th century to the glories of Wood's 18th century expansion as the luxurious and fashionable resort of Jane Austen. Fine streets of buildings in the classical tradition, furnished with the best of mahogany furniture from the West Indies' timber.

My own city of Bristol had much of its harbour trade in softwood timber from the Baltic coast. Climb into the attic of a Bristol house and you can see the difference - timber was cheap locally, and roof timbers are noticeably more generous than in other towns. At the turn of the century parts of the harbour were filled with "onkers", retired tea clippers reduced to working out their last days importing timber. It's no accident that Plimsoll developed his Plimsoll loading line in Bristol, and its different marks for fresh and salt water because of this Baltic trade. Some were reckoned to only be safely afloat when filled with buoyant timber ! They take their name of "onker" from the windmill-driven pumps they carried to deal with the leakage.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

Well done, Andy. Thanks for a very informative, as usual, post.

Reply to
Swingman

Reply to
patrick conroy

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