The rough lumber package costs $300 before our Guild discount. You can check the kits out here. The wood is Fiji-grown Genuine Mahogany and its absolutely beautiful stock. The widest board in the project is 10 3/4″ and with this kit, I won’t need to do any glueups! Even in their rough state, the boards look clean and clear. Should make for a great chair! And how does it compare to the material purchased locally? All I can say is so far so good. I’ll know more as I begin to mill the stock and reveal the grain under the surface.

I started to do some initial layout and noticed that Bell was pretty generous in terms of what they placed in the kit. If I’m really careful with my cuts and conservative in my usage, I’m going to have quite a bit of stock left over. Hmm…footrest anyone?

If you’ve never tried mail-ordering wood, I highly recommend it. Just be sure to use a high quality dealer that stands behind their product. Bell Forest Products has never disappointed me. You also might want to check out Horizon Wood Products and CR Muterspaw. For full disclosure, both of those companies are advertisers but I have had the good fortune of sampling their products and I really liked what I saw.

For folks who live in remote areas or simply don’t have access to a wide variety of species, mail-ordering is a great way to get some quality lumber delivered to your doorstep. The more I do it, the more confidence I have in the process. Of course its always better to pick out the boards yourself when grain and color matching is a big concern, but some folks just don’t have that option. I know many of you are mail ordering wood quite frequently. So what dealers have you had success with?

I once read in a textbook on wood that ?Mankind owes no greater debt than he does to wood.? If for nothing else, then for fire. Yet, we refer to a stone age, a bronze age, even a steam age, yet not a wood age? Were it not for the spear, later the bow and arow, would we still be using a stick to probe termite colonies, as our chimpanzee friends?

Were it not for wood?s uncanny ability to become, with a little help, paper, what good then Gutenberg? Without whom, there is certainly no internet. Indeed, the very air we breathe is given to us by the trees, and the water that moves through everything that lives, will pass through a tree, up through the root and out through the leaves? stomata.

As you plane and saw, sand and scrape, remember this my fellow whisperers. Those boards in your hands, likely lived longer than you have, or ever will. As they lay drying, the moisture content you seek to eradicate may have once flown through the Euphrates. Those piles of dust, which you will sweep up and toss, will join the scraps of your turkey sandwich in the landfill, becoming soil in which a new tree will root. It may well give place for your great grandson?s hammock, later to fall on his roof in a hurricane.

We may never, in all our doweling and dovetailing, give rise to anything nearly as beautiful as the precise engineering of the mighty xylem and phloem. Our silly paper towel holders and cutting boards, entertainment centers and porch swings may seem but paltry daydreams compared to the mighty Sequoia that lived several hundred years before the Magna Carta. Yet know this, as you keep your chisels honed, and pare away the slight layers of history, as you arrange those growth rings into a more stable pattern for your table top, square your shoulders and flush your cheeks, plunge your tenons into gluey mortises and clamp your jaws tight: it is as worthwhile as anything else that can be done. For kings need thrones, ships need rudders, and martyrs need a cross to bear.

Music courtesy of MusicAlley.com. The first track was Juxtaposition by B.D. Lenz and the second track was Phideauxs Strut by Brian McRae.

“I live on an island in Hawaii (surrounded by water of course) where the humidity is always high and it rains a lot. All the material that I’ve been reading says to dry your wood to about 6% before working on it. Then you leave it in your shop for several days to let it become equal to your humidity. My humidity is always super high. A lot of times in the 80′s and above. Do I still dry my wood to this dryness (6%) even though it will probably go up to 12 to 14 % after acclimated to my place (I do my work in a garage that is open on two sides)? Do I store my wood here in the open garage or somewhere else? What % humidity should I be working on my wood? BTW, the items will probably stay here in Hawaii and we don’t use heating and not a lot of us use air conditioning in their homes. So I believe the humidity inside and out are pretty similar. And it rains a lot here. Sometimes 3 to 5 times a week. I’ve seen charts that show the moisture in wood left on its own here will have between 11 and 14% moisture content throughout the whole year.”

And here was my reply:
“If you are buying kiln dried wood, it will most likely be shipped in at around 6-8%. But if it sits in a lumber yard for a while, you can count on the moisture content going higher and higher every day, until it reaches equilibrium with the environment. So by the time you get it, it is probably up in that higher range anyway. And just like in anyone else’s shop anywhere in the world, you want to let those boards acclimate to your shop’s conditions. And if there is a lot of humidity, your boards will have a higher than average moisture content. Remember that humidity is not necessarily our enemy. CHANGES is humidity are the real problem. So if its relatively constant inside and outside, you should have no problems working with wood that has as higher than average moisture content. Probably not a bad idea to get a moisture meter so you can monitor theses things and figure out just what percentage these boards get to and how they change over the course of the year. But it sounds like you already have a head start on the research. You are wise to be cautious. But I think your actual workflow will not be all that different from anyone else’s.”

Links:
End Table (Pt. 1)
End Table (Pt. 2)
End Table (Pt. 3)
End Table (Pt. 4)
End Table (Pt. 5)
End Table (Pt. 6)

“Quick question on joining treated pine – I would like to face glue surfaced 2×6 treated pine boards. Does the fact that i am using treated lumber reduce the strength of the joint or make the glue less effective somehow? This is for an application that will have to be waterproof.”

My reply is actually an excerpt from an article I found a while back from Iowa State Univeristy. Full Article Here.
Deposits on the surface of treated wood present problems in gluing. Oil-type preservatives typically present more problems than waterborne treatments. Wood treated with very high retentions of creosote or pentachlorophenol in heavy solvents is essentially non-gluable. Low retentions of penta in light solvents may be somewhat more readily glued than wood treated with creosote. Wood treated with waterborne chemicals usually can be glued without major problems, if properly dried. Planing or sanding the surface before gluing is recommended to enhance bonding. Select the adhesive appropriate for the exposure condition among conventional wood adhesives. Only resorcinol resin glues provide completely waterproof gluelines with wood; urea resin glues and polyvinyl resin adhesives generate only modest water-resistant glue bonds. Some types of elastomeric construction adhesives offer good resistance to moisture and are much more tolerant of high wood moisture contents and low temperatures than conventional wood adhesives.

If anyone has anything to add, please do so in the comments section. I personally have very little experience gluing treated wood.

Anatole wanted me to include the following information on shop-made splitters since there has been some interest.

Adding a splitter to a new tablesaw throat insert is an excellent safely practice. Once installed, neglecting it requires a conscious effort, so the odds are that it will see everyday, real-life use. I’ve found, though, that the usually recommended procedure of extending the kerf behind the blade and gluing in a wooden tongue is hard to pull off without introducing minuscule errors. And the slightest error will result in a device that snags the workpiece. This method solves those problems. Raise the sawblade through the new insert. Then place the insert against a fence on a drill-press table. Align things by lowering a drill bit of a diameter that is equal to the blade thickness (usually 1/8 in.) into the kerf. When the bit is centered in the kerf, lock the fence, change to a drill bit 1/32 in. smaller, switch on the drill press and bore a hole near the outfeed end of the kerf. Now push that same drill bit into the hole, shank up, along with a dab of cyanoacrylate glue. The drill bit will now serve as the splitter pin. It will be aligned perfectly with the sawkerf and should have about 1/64 in. of clearance on each side.

Michael Standish, Roxbury, Mass.

Fine Woodworking Magazine, October 2001 No. 151

This week’s project comes from Jason (aka cfiiman in the chatroom). He writes:

It is made out of solid black walnut and a curly maple decorative border…I went with dovetails on the rails and for my first time I think they turned out ok, the table is finished with tung oil…I am in the middle of a “matching” table, sort of, but I am going with finger joints instead of dovetails b/c I really think they look good and mortise & tenon rack in the bottom. Thanks guys!

It’s a very unique piece that includes some unconventional features. I for one would like to know more the joinery used for the brace at the bottom. Nice work Jason!

And I need to send out a big thank you to Nick for producing the SketchUp drawing above. Simply click the picture and you can download the .skp file. If you don’t have SketchUp, you can download the free version here.