Can live oak be used for building wood projects? I am about to have a live oak tree taken down and I would like to have the trunk cut into planks. I don't want to spend the money for sawing if it is not a good wood for projects.
Thanks
Don
Oak is great for lots of things. If you have it cut you need to stack it with wood strips (stickers) spacing the layers and space between the p[lanks for air circulation. It will need to air-dry for one year per inch of thickness.
djb
Live oak is hard as a stone. You may have trouble finding a sawyer who's willing to cut it up for you -- it's pretty hard on blades. I don't think I'd want to try to make furniture out of it.
-- Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)
How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?
Popt50 asks:
Ayup.
A bit difficult to season...slow, slow, slow is best. Keep out of sun, coat ends. Durable wood (makes the heaviest picnic tables you'll find if all you use is domestic wood). Used for ship framing 250-300 years ago. Not generally available as a commercial timber, very hard, hard to work, should be fun and a true challenge (not a yuppie synonym for a problem).
Enjoy.
Charlie Self
"In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains." Dwight D. Eisenhower
Steven Bliss notes:
Distorted grain is common in live oak.
Charlie Self
"In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains." Dwight D. Eisenhower
That's 'cause live oak is not oak. I never heard of it until I visited South Carolina a couple of years ago and saw lots of it along the side roads. Look it up, it's an interesting tree.
Mike
This is what comes from living so far north... "live oak" is apparently a specific type of tree, rather than an oak tree that is alive.
Learn sumpin' every day.
djb
"Doug Miller" wrote
In the UK there are mobiles that will do the job for you.
Jaqy
Quercus virginiana. Coastal plain of the U.S. south from Virginia to southern Florida. Georgia state tree.
It is really a bitch to work...shipworkers used to try to find crotches and limbs already shaped close to what they neede, because old tools had a hard time with the distorted grain. New tools can also run into severe problems.
Charlie Self
"In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains." Dwight D. Eisenhower
Michael Daly responds:
Quercus virginiania is an oak.
Charlie Self
"In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains." Dwight D. Eisenhower
Yeah, but there isn't any live oak in the UK. It grows only in the coastal regions of the southeastern USA.
-- Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)
How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?
Very common tree here in Texas. AAMOF, the Spanish name for oak, encina, graces a town or two with names like 'Encinal', which loosely translated to a grove of live oaks from whence the towns sprung. Many of the old land deed records, especially the large Spanish grants, still have boundary descriptions of "so many varas to a live oak for a corner, then NW so many varas to another live oak for a corner ..."
I've seen some old live oaks whose branches easily cover an area 150'+ in diameter. IIRC, there was also a species that was native to Baja California when I visited there many years ago.
You need to write a book, Charlie. ;>)
Swingman notes:
I'm working on it. The live oak is a lovely tree in a squatty sort of way...and down in the S. Carolina and Georgia areas, it is usually heavily draped with Spanish moss, making it even more gothic looking. The tend not to be much mroe than 50' tall, and while 150' is probably unusual, I'd guess half that isn't, maybe even 2/3.
Tankoak is sometimes called live oak, too...Lithocarpus densiflorus. Way west for this one, usually along the Pacific coastal ranges starting in Oregon, to Socal.
Massive tree, to 80 feet, though the big ones are now hard to find. Not as hard, nor as durable, as true live oak, but QS ray flecks are nice and it's a pretty wood (I think). Much easier to work than real live oak, too.
Charlie Self
"In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains." Dwight D. Eisenhower
Did a web search... looks like a gorgeous shade tree.
Acorns, but the leaves are nothing like any oak I've seen, and it's an evergreen!
Thanks to the OP and everyone else for the opportunity to learn something.
djb
It does lose its leaves, in the spring, but the new leaves replace the old so fast that it is never actually bare.
Generally it's easier to make projects out of it if the oak is dead first. :)
Ooops, you're right. My memory must be slipping - I remembered reading that live oak was a misnamed tree as it wasn't oak. Perhaps I'm mixing it up with another tree.
Mike
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