Wood

[FrozenNorth]

Wood & Tools.

It is not off topic, nothing to do with baptists or windows mail.

Discuss :-)

[Josepi]

I wood!

------------------

Wood & Tools.

It is not off topic, nothing to do with baptists or windows mail.

Discuss :-)

[Luigi Zanasi]

I saw some incredible stuff in Costa Rica and I am sorely tempted to ship back a container load to Canada. I bought a book on woods of Costa Rica with ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY different species of wood in a country smaller than Nova Scotia. And the author missed at least one that I know of. A sculptor & turner by the name of Dany at LaFortuna uses mainly a wood he calls "Lorito" (Cojoba arborea) which is not in the book. Really nice stuff.

How much milled and stickered wood would fit in a container?

Luigi

[Lew Hodgett]

ship back a container load to Canada.

------------------------------- When you mention Costa Rica and "wood" in the same sentence, I immediately think of "Plantation Teak".

Keeps the boat builders supplied even if it is close to $20/BF.

Lew

[Puckdropper]

FrozenNorth wrote in news:ioqqkv$h4n$1 @dont-email.me:

The planer's really changed the way I look at things. I took an old ugly looking piece of wood with paint on one side and started planing it. Little by little the grain emerged. The two pieces I cut out of it will be the end frames for my latest project, a model railroad throttle holder (think big remote control holder.)

My planer doesn't always want to accept the wood I'm feeding it. It's set for a shallow cut, but the wood just rubs up against the feed rollers. Any suggestions?

Puckdropper

[Lee Michaels]

OK, we are talking about tropical plantation wood??

I had a job recently where I had to buy some balsa, cut it to size (easy to do) and fit it into some small boxes. They asked me to look into how practical it would be to do this on a large scale. It turns out that balsa, which is grown rapidly on plantations, has tripled in price in the last year or so. The reason?? Windmills!!

Yep, that's right. Balsa will grow easily to 90 feet long in just a few years. (I forget how many, but it doesn't take that long) It can then be cut into long timbers that are straight and lightweight. They can be transported in third world countries and be put up with minimal machinery and skills. The windmills are used both for electricity and pumping water.

The model makers are upset. They are paying a lot more for balsa and the supply is less. There are different grades of balsa. The firmer balsa is two to three times the cost of the regular grade. There are a lot of art and hobby applications for balsa. I talked to a model maker. he makes everything from building models to new car models, parts of various kinds, etc. He used to cut everything out by hand. He now just sends in a file and his balsa wood distributor cuts all the parts out on their laser. As soft as balsa is, almost any laser cutting job would almost instant.

I never worked with balsa before. It is an interesting wood. Not at all durable. Anyway, when the folks I was working with found out the costs and availability issues, they immediately began looking for other materials. Many balsa distributors are out of many sizes and some can not get in any new stock. People are buying up the balsa for windmill lumber.

How does one build a windmill from balsa? That would be an interesting project. I think you would have to be careful with the fasteners as to not damage the wood. Balsa may be a renewable resource. But there is only so much to go around. If this trend continues, I suppose they will plant more balsa trees. But I think the price will never go back down again.

[Lew Hodgett]

-------------------------------- If you want to extend the life of your planer blades, don't run painted surfaces thru them.

Removing paint is a good task for a belt sander with 24 grit belts.

BTDT.

Sounds like your boards might be cupped.

Make sure you start boards cup side (concave) down to start the process.

BTW, 1/32"/pass works for me.

Lew

[Just Wondering]

A young man lost an eye in an accident and was fitted with a prosthetic replacement made of lacquered maple. This left him feeling very self-conscious, and he stopped going out. A friend finally convinced him to go to a dance, but he stood alone against a wall, afraid to make a move. The poor soul looked around and say a young lady sitting alone. No one was asking her to dance because she too was handicapped, having lost a leg and been fitted with a prosthetic. He thought, "maybe she'll dance with me." Screwing up his courage, he approached and asked if she'd like to dance. The young lady's face lit up, and she exclaimed, "Would I! Would I!" So he pointed back and answered, "Peg leg! Peg leg!"

[Noons]

FrozenNorth wrote,on my timestamp of 22/04/2011 12:54 PM:

Are you suggesting baptists do strange things to windows mail? Or vicky-the-versa?

Did some maintenance and pruning in the garden today. Found out yesterday the two trees in the front are Podocarpus Elatus. aka Plum pine, or Illawarra Plum Pine. And the weird looking seeds - Illawarra plums - are edible and quite nice, thanking you very much:

looking plums: the bulb at the end is hard and has the seed, the other one before is the sweet one. One of the traditional aboriginal "bush foods".

[Luigi Zanasi]

I was quoted a price of 1,500 colones per pulgada by a sawmill for any species, which amounts to a little less than $3.00 a board-foot. Run of the mill, of course. I wasn't really interested in teak, which is not a native species. Buyt there might be a way of making money there.

Luigi

[J. Clarke]

If the Westboro Baptist Church has taken over Microsoft it would explain much.

other

[basilisk]

green wood, even on sticks, put in a container will grow mold at a prodigous rate, most likely destroying any value it had. It would need to be air dried and/or treated with a fungicide. Plus heated treated or fumigated for insects to allow importation. Could still be done at a fair profit, I expect.

basilisk

[DGDevin]

I manage to salvage a lot of wood from around the homestead--tearing apart and rebuilding a closet, knocking down an old fence--stuff like that. But I just demolished a series of plywood boxes SWMBO had been using as shelves for her ever-growing collection of potted plants (happily outside) and I can't think what I'm going to use the salvaged wood for. The screw holes are rusty or even semi-rotted, there are several thick coats of paint, and the pieces are at most 18" in size. I might actually have to get rid of this material because I can't picture using it for everything useful and that goes against the grain (so to speak).

[Lew Hodgett]

-------------------------------------- Check out Baltek, a distributor or core materials used to produce laminated sandwich core lay-ups.

These days, a lot of balsa core is being used with carbon fiber prepregs to produce wind mill blades.

The balsa core is configured in the end grain position which makes it very strong in compression.

Typical core thicknesses are about 1" +/-.

Lew

[Leon]

Wood & Tools.

It is not off topic, nothing to do with baptists or windows mail.

Discuss :-)

[Lew Hodgett]

not a native species. Buyt there might be a way of making money there.

-------------------------------- They have been growing plantation teak in Costa Rica since at least the early 1970's.

Think there was some Rockefeller money involved to get started as a way of off setting the closure of Thai teak to harvesting.

Lew

[Robatoy]

And THAT is why I always drain the fat off fried ground sirloin before I put in my chilli.

[Luigi Zanasi]

Good point. I hadn't thought of that. Except I think most of it is not really green in that the only trees that can be harvested in Costa Rica are standing dead or fallen down (except for the plantation stuff Lew was talking about. I don't know why they don't plant mahogany instead of teak ;-) ).

Some of the naturally "fallen" trees somehow get chainsaw marks at the stump end. But that was obviously only to even out the end, right?

I did look up the regs for importing into Canada. We don't need to fumigate tropical species, it just can't have bark on it.

Luigi

[J. Clarke]

Just make sure that none of it is on an endangered species list and any of it that needs a certification that is from a managed forest has the certification.

One of the local yards used to have an amazing array of Argentinian hardwoods at very reasonable prices but the gummint cracked down on them and they won't touch the stuff anymore.

[Robatoy]

A couple of enterprising lads from these parts brought in a couple of containers of merbau. That was 25 years ago. They did all the calculations and had decided to rough cut the timbers and stickering them right inside the containers. That worked well for them, aside from the fact that nobody wanted the stuff... at least not back then. I was offered as much as I wanted at 70 centsbd/ft but passed as I had no idea what to do with it. Kinda teak-ish looking stuff, supposedly termite resistant. The guys broke even on it and admitted that they should have investigated the market for such wood a bit more. (These days, Greenpeace will scuttle your boat if you're taking merbau off the Philippines)

I guess the lesson in this is that bringing in a load of anything, makes sense if there's a buyer for it who can be offered a better deal than what he's getting now. Pretty woods have a certain demand from the fringe, but they're invariably cheap bastards. A turner wants to make a pretty bowl out of a 10 dollar hunk of wood, not necessarily a

50 dollar piece. I have had discussions with suppliers of super-cool flitches to the luthier trades, etc, but they're all poor and want deals.

Do you really want to bring in a container full of stuff with those cheapos waiting for you?

Guys like A & M in Cambridge, ON, already have pipelines to the good stuff and make a reasonable mark-up on it.

There's way more money to be made if you can find a way to get food to Nunavit. Instant noodles: $3.99 Processed cheese spread: $29.39 Honey, small jar: $11.19 Cranberry cocktail 1.5litre: $38.99 Breaded chicken, 15 pieces: $77.39 Margarine medium size tub: $27.79 Spaghettini 900 grams: $13.29 Infant formula 700 grams: $40.99

Real numbers.