On Mar 29, 1:38=A0pm, rwk wrote: =A0 wondering if
From the "indisputable" wickipedia
"The wood is generally marketed as red oak, but is of significantly inferior quality, being somewhat weaker, often with many small knots.
Yeah, I don't think I'd bother trying to make it into lumber. You will most likely be underwhelmed.
Hard to say; the lower few feet won't be straight grained, which leaves
50 feet, 28" diameter... call it 40 percent waste (the bark part and the core don't make the best lumber), so it's 1300 board feet?Even if this species is 'inferior', it has quite a lot of value. Milling to planks, drying, surfacing are all best left to the pros. Bragging about the local wood you made into bookcases, stair treads, kitchen cabinets... that, you can do yourself.
Wood is wood. I'm building my kitchen cupboards with Tamerack (Larch?). The locals use it for firewood.
When you concider that the wood will just end up in a dump, why not give it a try. Bragging rights are worth more per board foot than any lumber you can buy.
LdB
Get it "quarter sawn"and the grain should be beautifull. It might not be as strong as regular white or red oak, but it should be "purty"!!
I'd say that's kind of neat.
We had a couple of Red-Tip Photenias that have succumbed to the fungus that is killing them across the country. One died a couple of years ago and we left it standing as a bird feeder. Took it down a couple of weeks ago and just for fun, cut it into lumber on the bandsaw (about 18" long sections). It looks like it might have some spalting, wormholes and a good bit of figure. Don't know what I'll do with it yet, but I'll find some use in a year or two.
On Mar 29, 5:28=A0pm, whit3rd wrote:
A friend of the family had some pin oak given to him as part of a lumber buy (he used to peddle lumber on the side). I got some really nice 12"w x 5/4 about 6' long pin oak for helping him unload one day. The only way I could obviously tell the difference between pin oak and read oak is that in pin oak that all the knots will almost always pop out. No such thing as a "sound knot". This can cut the effective yield appreciably depending on the project. Made a couple of simple backless benches for the "kids" table in the coffee hour area for church about 3-4 years ago out of this stuff. There were a few perfect boards in the mix and I used two of those for the seats. Not a hint of structural problems -- and some of the kids parents use benches; this being in America means that the benches have had well over 250 pounds dropped in the middle of a 5' span. The joinery on this wasn't really fancy/intricate so I can't say much about the expected problems with respect to humidity changes. The free stuff I got was all flat sawn; I do remember looking at the edges and not seeing anything which would lead me to expect quarter sawn would exhibit significant figure/rays. IIRC it took stain about like red oak (not like white oak) with an open grain structure. All in all seemed a lot like red oak with nasty knots to me. If I had access to a sawyer at reasonable cost and the wood was likely to be free of metal nasties and I had a place to store the lumber, I'd probably have it milled.
hex
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