Choosing the Right Wood to Build With | Lumber Explained

one of the biggest hurdles to overcome when you first start woodworking is to figure out what kind of wood to use for your projects there's solid wood or plywood softwood hardwood construction grade domestic exotic and not dimension trying to make sense of all the sizes involved it can be pretty overwhelming but don't worry we're gonna sort all of that out in this video and a little later I'm going to show you a couple of specific projects of mine and the wood I used and why I used it simply put solid wood is cut directly from a tree it doesn't have any composite materials like MDF or fiber board and it doesn't have any layers glued together like plywood solid wood is steady and secure but it does take on and release moisture throughout the year so if you don't take that movement into account your project could crack or split the most widely available solid wood here in the US is known as SPF spruce pine fir it can be any of those three species that you may know it more commonly as a 2x4 or 2x6 this is construction grade lumber and it can be found at almost any big home center or lumber yard bruce pine and firs are conifer trees which are trees that are generally evergreen and have a cone woods that come from conifer trees are known as soft woods now I'm not gonna get into this too much but not all soft woods are soft not all hard woods are hard but generally that's the case so as a woodworker the primary benefit of this construction grade type lumber is the price it can be very cheap especially if you need a thicker piece the building a table out of SPF from Home Depot is gonna cost you about 1/4 of what it would cost if you built it out of say walnut or cherry if you go the construction grade lumber route for your project just make sure they're stamped KD or HT or both that means kiln dried heat treated all the pests have been killed and the actual wood is dry if you come across something that's labeled AD for air dry or s grn surface green or something to that effect that wood is still really wet I would stay away from it because it's got a lot of shrinking to do as that water evaporates off and that could cause you problems in your project go with something that's actually kiln-dried because even though it probably has a little bit more drying to do it's not near as much as wood that hasn't been killed dried and it's gonna move a lot less I talked about conifer trees and soft woods a little earlier now let's talk about deciduous trees these are trees that lose their leaves in the fall and we call the wood from these trees hardwoods there are exceptions to this rule but overall hardwoods are much denser than soft woods there are a wide variety of hardwoods but for the sake of this video I'm just gonna go with two categories domestic and exotic domestics are anything to grow in your regions so here in the US that would be woods like walnut cherry maple oak exotics or anything that grows somewhere else and have to be imported into your area so here in the US that would be things like wingait zebra woods soupy Lea yellow heart Purple Heart things like that your ability to find these different woods depends on where you are I'm in the southern United States so if I go to Lowe's or Home Depot besides construction grade lumber they've got red oak poplar and a really nice pine there's no other domestics and they don't have any exotics so if I want something else I have to go to the lumber mill which I do 99% of the time or someplace like woodcraft who also has a selection of different exotics and domestics you can also order online so even though you can't see every piece and put your hands on it and match grain before you buy it it's becoming increasingly popular just about every woodworker a DIY or is gonna have this moment questioning their sanity where they see the size on a piece of wood but when they've gone to work with it they realize I'm missing half an inch and who knows exactly where this comes from but I would guess that it's probably from when they first cut that piece of wood it's likely 2 inches by 4 inches but going through the milling process to get it flat and smooth and square they've taken some of its size down and when you go to buy lumber in a lumber yard it gets even worse they refer to size in quarters and board feet if you see boards labeled 4 quarter or 4 over 4 those are one inch thick since four quarters equals one so six quarter is an inch and a half thick eight quarters is two inches thick and so on but for you get too excited those numbers are also nominal a four quarter board that's supposed to be an inch thick is actually about thirteen sixteenths of an inch thick when you go to pay at the lumberyard this is something that even experienced woodworkers struggle with but especially beginners the lumber industry has something called board feet and it's the length times the width times the thickness and then that gets divided by a hundred and forty four so you take that number and then you've got a price that's set per board foot for say walnut and if it's 350 a board foot you take that answer times 350 and that's the price of the board but don't sweat all this and definitely don't let it deter you from going to a lumber yard because honestly that's where the great prices are the great selection and you're really gonna miss out if you avoid lumber yards just don't hesitate to ask the questions that you have if you don't understand board feet ask them to explain how they're measuring how they're calculating and every time you go you're a little bit more experienced and knowledgeable than the last time materials like plywood MDF and fiber board can either be thin layers of wood glued together or they can be some sort of composite material that may or may not have actual wood in it these materials can be great for projects like cabinets where you need wide surfaces because they come in four by eight sheets where solid wood you'd have to glue pieces together to get the width you need all of these have the added benefit of little to no movement during the seasons as water is absorbed and evaporated MDF and fiber board have virtually no movement plywood we'll just a little bit because they are real wood layers but they're so thin and they're stacked in alternating directions that the overall movement is hardly noticeable the drawback to all these materials is that they're not near as strong and won't last near as long as solid wood and generally traditional joinery methods like mortise and Tenon's are pretty worthless to attempt so don't bother I mentioned briefly before that plywood is a stack of thin layers of wood that are turned in different grain directions and then glued together plywood gets graded and part of that grade is based off of what each side looks like or each face if it's smooth and blemish free and has a really nice appearance that's a higher-quality face if it's got a bunch of knots or it's repeating pattern or it looks more like construction grade lumber and that's a lower quality face and you can get plywood and any combination of good or bad faces or both bad or both good so recently I did a project where I bought mostly plywood with a good side and a bad side because only one side would show and then I had just two pieces that we're gonna show both sides so I bought higher-quality plywood for that there are a lot of different types of plywood they have different applications things such as OSB which is just layers of wood that are stacked and glued on each other in a certain way and it creates a plywood panel I would never use that for something like a furniture project or even a shop project where the OSB would show in the end it's more in my opinion for construction type applications where it's gonna be hidden on the same hand I wouldn't personally use an expensive plywood for something that's gonna take a beating there's also ply woods that live in that middle area that aren't too expensive but also still look pretty nice and one of those is radiata pine it's about sixty percent the price of a sheet of oak plywood so quite a bit less expensive but it looks way better than OSB you can actually make a pretty nice finished project if you pick through the pile a little bit and get a nice sheet just most of the time the other side is gonna be pretty rough with knots and repeating patterns and look having more of a construction look so you're most of the time gonna have to be able to hide that side in your project one big consideration especially with MDF and to a lesser degree plywood is that they don't like water at all plywood can be resistant to weather as long as you keep water out of the ends where the actual layers are exposed so most of the time you'd put a solid wood banding all around the edges to hide that and then also just like any other would put a finish on there to resist water as much as possible logs can be cut in several different ways the first way we're going to talk about is plain sawn or flats on that is where the grain is parallel to the face if we take a board here this grain runs parallel to the faces the top face and the bottom face this is the cheapest way for a Sawyer to mill the log since he gets the most wood from the tree another way to flat saw is to make passes down to the top of the pith and then roll the log over do the same thing down to the pith and do that all the way around but the problem is it's by far the most unstable and the board's can cup and twist easily most of the board's you find at the Home Center are flats on with knots cathedrals in an unstable shape a Sawyer can also quarter-sawed this log he'll cut it up into four sections or four quarters and a lot of times but not all the time they'll cut a slab directly out of the middle to get rid of this pith once this is quartered one piece at a time will go up on the mill it'll make a pass roll it over make a pass roll it over and make a pass and if you see this grain is almost ninety degrees to 60 degrees either way to the face this results in a much more secure and stable board the grain is a lot straighter and then if you have Mary rays that come out from the center which I don't think this log does then the Ray flex will show up on the face of the board there is more waste cutting it this way compared to flats on so quarter sawing is more expensive the last one I'll talk about is rifts on that's when the Sawyer's trying to get boards that are oriented so that the grain is 30 to 60 degrees to the face they really want to get it as close to 45 degrees to the face as they can and this results in the absolute straightest cleanest grain because there's so much waste with a rifts on log it's much more expensive to buy these types of boards compared to quarter sawn or flats on but we talked about the pros and cons of construction grade lumber earlier if one advantage is the affordability then the downside has to be the difficulty in building with it because the majority of it is flats on and it's so unstable and it cups and it twists the first project I'm going to show you is this balustrade coffee table that I built several years ago to keep the cost down I used all construction grade lumber for this table except for the balusters which were ordered just as they are the table top is two by sixes these little pieces on the top and bottom of the balancers are also two by sixes and then the base is two by fours pocket screw together with one by six is laying on top of that now if you've seen the video I did on the balustrade coffee table this is obviously not that one this is the first one I ever built of this style and I actually messed up in a couple of different ways the first thing I would say is that I would never recommend painting a table like this white because it gets way too much traffic it's very hard to keep it clean and it stains very easily secondly the two by sixes I used to build this were really wet and I really didn't know enough to pay attention to that back then they've cupped very badly in places there's some cracking going on and even though the breadboard ends were cut correctly with space on each side for contraction expansion these just have way too much drying to do and so they've caused issues if you look at the end piece normally you will see a lip here because of the nature of how these are expanding wood expands across its grain so this end piece is gonna expand this way and all of the middle part is going to expand this way so you would expect in the wintertime that the middle part would contract and shrink and that you would have a little bit of an overhang here the problem is this was so wet that it contracted and contracted and this lip is always here and in the wintertime it just gets much worse you can successfully use construction grade lumber to build a table like this no problem since this table I've built two more out of the exact same type of lumber that I just made sure was dry and I built it in the right way and those tables are going on several years and they look great so just make sure your wood is kiln dry build your project right accounting for wood movement and you won't have a problem this project is a cabinet on stand I built for one of my daughter's a few years ago and is based off a plan by Mike Pekka Vic I wanted this to be an heirloom quality piece that she could keep for a long time and eventually passed down so I made it out of really nice hardwood it's mainly hard maple and then it's Purpleheart accents and the rainbow on the front is made out of all exotic wood Paducah red heart yellow heart and purple heart you'll know from earlier in this video that if you see cathedrals like this and some of this grain pattern here the start of some tree limbs things like that you'll know that those are flats on pieces but if you look at the top rail of the door you see that that is fairly straight grain and then also the back is fairly straight so that's a quarter sawn piece of wood these pieces of Purple Heart and really straight grain on the faces and on the edges those are quarter sawn Purple Heart the legs are close to two inches by two inches and if you'll notice they've got two sides that are really straight grain and then two sides that are flat some grain and if you look at the ends they've got a basic riffs on orientation but on the opposite orientation it looks close to flat sawn and that's why we get this grain pattern the last project I'm going to show you are these bookcases and cubbies that I built there's a lot of surface area here so this was a perfect opportunity to use plywood and that made it a lot cheaper and because I didn't want the plywood inste show I cut strips of solid wood and glued them to the front and then in the back I could have used the same plywood that I used for the rest of the cabinet but instead I chose this really cheap fiber board and it worked great I know this video was packed with a lot of information so if you've got a question put it down in the comments if I can't answer it or somebody else in the community then we'll find the answer somehow also if I left something out or you don't quite agree with something I said put that down in the comments if this video helps you out consider subscribing thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Out of the Woodwork

Views: 3,007

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: How to Choose the Right Wood For Your Projects, choosing the right wood to build with, what kind of wood should you build with, best wood for furniture, how to choose the best wood for woodworking, choosing the right lumber, choosing the correct wood for your projects, how to buy lumber, when to use quartersawn wood, beginner woodworking, out of the woodwork, choosing the right wood for your woodworking project, can I use any type of wood to build with

Id: tmOsUJ8uMFs

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 24 2019