Land of Oz

Wood

Wood is interesting. It's all around - at least up here in Michigan it is. But go to a lumber yard and look out. You can go to one of the mainstream stores like Lowes or Home Depot and buy wood. You can get a pretty nice piece of pine, say 1 x 4 x 96 inches and pay under US$3. It'll have some knots and maybe a split or two, but if you look carefully, you can get some pretty attractive stuff. I've made furniture, boxes and toys out of the stuff. It's not the fancy pants oak or maple furniture that you see for thousand$ of dollars in some furniture stores, but the light finish and scattered knots in a TV stand or blanket chest have an attraction that I like.

Which brings me to a couple of things about wood. You'll see I mentioned a 1 x 4 x 96 inch piece of wood above. It's not really that. If you're lucky it'll be 3/4 x 3 1/2 by 96 inches. That works out to 252 cubic inches versus the 384 cubic inches as advertised, or 66% of what you're told. This is supposedly because they measure the wood before they finish it. Think about this for a minute. What if you bought a litre of Diet Pepsi and it only contained 670 ml, or how about buying a 5 pound box of sugar that only had 3.3 pounds of the sweet stuff in it. And it keeps getting smaller - take plywood for example. A 3/4 inch thick piece of plywood doesn't need finishing. It's made that size. However it's actually 23/32 of an inch thick, only 96% of what you'd expect.

Now a bit about prices. If you know nothing about wood, and even if you know a little, it's kind of hard to understand that while a pine board, 1 x 4 x 96 can be bought for US$3, you can move to the next set of bins and find another pine board the same size for maybe US$8. And if you move a couple more bins over you can get a nice oak board the same size for around $US15. These prices are approximate by the way. Outside of the BORGs^* like Lowes, most wood is sold by board foot. What this means is that the price is for a piece of wood that is 144 cubic inches (12" x 12" x 1"). If it's only 4" wide and 1" thick then a board foot would be 36" long.

So, I went crazy this last weekend. You know how they say not to go grocery shopping on an empty stomach? Well, don't go lumber shopping on an empty bandsaw. I went to a local specialty lumberyard near here - Barndoor Lumber. I wandered around their bins of woods and saw some light colored wood that caught me eye - birds eye maple. sigh... I ended up leaving the place with wood that could easily be carried in one arm and bill that couldn't. The bill came to US$70 - almost half of which went to a board about 4 foot long, 1 inch thick and 8 inches wide - with the little eye markings of birds eye maple. 2.5 board feet at US$15 per. Oh well, it's only money.

*BORG - Big Orange Retail Giant (mostly applies to Home Depot (orange) but used for Lowes as well) - also as in "resistance is futile" when applied to local hardware stores.