DON'T Buy These Boards from Lowe's

so we're back at the shiplap project and we actually just wrapped it up we got some minor touch-ups we're working on right now and it went really well we kept stacking those boards up if you caught the first video where i started and i figured the layout and everything this is a continuation of that we just kept stacking them up from that landing all the way up to the ceiling the 20-foot ceiling there and then we just used a little back band to end it at that far wall and it really worked out really good i think it looks really clean and then we came down to the staircase or the wall under the staircase and we same thing figured out the math on that one kept stacking them up had a couple of tricky little cuts in there but everything came out clean um really happy with the results on this one and we sprayed it with sherwin-williams emerald urethane in satin so we masked everything off that was a pretty big process there just keeping all the overspray out of everything and then ended up spraying this thing so it was pretty cool so in my hands right here i have two boards that look pretty much identical they're both primed they're both pine they're both one by six and they're pretty much the same right no not true they're actually very different and this one right here is from windsor one this one right here is from lowe's now neither one of these companies know i'm making this video this video is not sponsored by windsor one and as you're going to see is definitely not sponsored by lowe's they'd probably sponsor me to not publish this video now i'm not trying to like attack lowe's or anything like that i actually really like lowe's what i'm trying to do here is just educate you guys on what is a quality board because i think it's important it's going to make you look better as a carpenter it's going to make your work go together better it's going to make you feel better about your job and that's why for the past year and a half ever since i was introduced to these boards from windsor one i use them so we're going to go over this board first show you why it's superior and then i'm going to show you why that lowe's board right there is inferior now this shiplap job that we just did here it was all windsor 1 1x12s just all nice square edge boards just really nicely milled stuff i mean you got to see it to really you know see the difference in real life you know comparing these two boards and that's kind of the goal of this video to kind of give you some up close shots on these and tell you guys why we prefer this over what you can buy down at lowe's or i can make this video about home depot any of those kind of big box stores are going to have boards that are inferior to this now before we get into this let me just say people will say yeah you know those boards are nice winds are won whatever you know they're great but i'm just not willing to pay that price 14 cents more per board that's it i just called the lumber yard right now one by six from windsor one one by six wins there's gonna be 37.50 and i could pull up and show you the price from lowe's on the one by six um 16 footer 14 cents per board and it's pretty much that way across the board for everything one by four one by six one by eight one by twelves basically the same price you're going to get at the big box stores but you'll get a more quality board now the one thing i will say is lowe's and you know home depot they are more convenient if you're just going to go grab a board but usually that's not typically what we do we're usually buying you know large amounts of boards and using them on projects and you're going to see why we like to do this now this one right here 1 by 6 windsor one primed board latex acrylic primer truly measures five and a half inches by three quarters so it is a true one by six it's a radiotaping it has a nice smooth surface or this one did at one point these are both just off cuts it does have a backside is not reversible so you'll notice by the printing on there manufactured in the usa it's got those nice square edges just square edge board right there 90 degrees checks out everything quality board even feels good now immediately when we switch over to this board that's from lowe's the first thing i noticed this thing feels waterlogged it just feels like just it doesn't feel like quality and by the way both of these boards are finger jointed so these are not solid pine so uh this board right here it's a one by six but it's not a true one by six because it's five and a half inches wide it does check out that way but unfortunately it's only 11 16 thick now the key here and kind of the really weird thing about this board is that it's not really 11 16 thick it's probably closer to 5 8 because there is a 16th of an inch of primer on one side of this board and like a 30 second of an inch of a primer on the other side of this board so i did not pick this out to make this video and like show you guys the worst of the worst this is literally just an off cut and i see this every time look get a close up on that right there there is a 16th of an inch of primer on that board and that is just ridiculous like that that just blows my mind i i used to when i first started i would get these boards from lowe's occasionally i used to use a lot of mdf actually and we've kind of completely gotten away from that but i would get these boards and i would cut it and i would see that and it just wouldn't register with me i'm like that's weird why is i just cut that and why is there so much paint spilled over on the side like it doesn't make any sense fast forward a couple years and i get educated on this stuff here from windsor and i started talking to the guys there and one of the guys in particular dave rogers i met up with me and he was kind of giving me the rundown on these boards and i was like what is this stuff right here he's like oh that's that's a gesso coating it's like a clay coating they do that so they can save more money at their meals and use more wood basically so they can mass produce more and basically like get a better bottom dollar on their margins and i was like okay well good for them bad for us because when you use that so much of that gesso coating or whatever that stuff is it's like a clay that they kind of like cure on here it's it's so thick that you can't get a square edge on there so like on the windsor board how it's square edged these are all rounded over like a 32nd of an inch which does not make for good joints let's say you're going to build a wainscot unit so you got your bottom rail right here with this lows board and then you've got you know your vertical style coming in if you take a look at that you have this little dip or valley right there where you don't have a face frame quality finish and that's that's that's just not gonna work you know that would have to be bonded that have to be sanded and that just causes a lot more work versus this the windsor won as your bottom rail and then this is another little off cut right here but this is a windsor board when i put those together you can see i get a nice clean flush face frame quality finish right there and it really needs maybe just a light sanding we'll pass it over with a surf prep sander and we'll be on our way so that's one of the big problems with these boards they're just they're just not quality so what i want to do because that coating right there is so thick i want to kind of peel back the layers on that and we're literally going to do that i got my planer over here and we're going to plane this off and see what kind of a quality wood is behind it because i've never seen that quality of wood i've seen this quality of wood because we've sanded it down we've sand that that primer off it's like a really thin layer of primer it's good wood back there but let's see what lowe's is hiding under this coating right here let's check it out something crazy too before i i'm actually going to cut this board first so i can save this kind of sample piece so i can compare it and show customers and why we're going to go with these boards so i'm going to chop this off but the customer here actually pointed this out to me because i was showing him if he could spot the differences and he did right away but he pointed this out there's a chip in the coating there and he was like what is that i was like you know what i didn't even see that but that's a cracked off chip of that coating it shows you how thick that is so i'm going to save this as a sample just cut this off real quick all right now that we got that and look just to prove to you guys that i didn't pick the worst i could find that coating goes all the way through i just cut that right there and it's a true sixteenth of an inch so check it out we'll show you right there sixteenth of an inch pretty crazy stuff so what we're to do now is we're going to peel back the layers on this i'm going to start with my planer here at a 64th of an inch so we're going to plane through that and that's probably just going to be pla planing off that coating which is ridiculous but i want to see if this board is consistent all the way throughout and i know it's a small sample but we'll still check it out once we go from a 64th we'll go up to a 30 second and we'll just keep going up until we hit wood i want to do it that way just to check the consistency in the coating so here we go a 64th of an inch and we're going to plane through this [Music] no wood that's crazy absolutely no in a 64th of an inch so you can see right there this there's still a long way to go so right now we'll go to we'll skip the 32nd we'll go to 364th and then we'll see if we hit any wood that way [Music] all right so it looks like yeah the coating is really inconsistent which was to be expected because i knew this and i could still show you this on the other side as you get further to the edge of the board the coating diminishes which is so strange i mean if you if you're trying to do some kind of joinery pocket hole or whatever it's going to really throw your stuff off so you can see this right here it's just really really inconsistent so i'm going to finish going through i'm going to turn the board around actually we'll start on this side and i'm going to go all the way through on that 360 force right there totally totally inconsistent it's crazy and this is not me leaning the planer over at all this is i'm keeping it straight and flush but from the wood i'm seeing i mean the wood the wood really doesn't look too bad from what i'm seeing so far we'll see okay so now that we have our suck ax hooked up we can go ahead and plane the rest of this and let's keep revealing what's under this coating [Music] so looking at this it's really not as bad as what i expected i expected like a finger joint every three inches honestly just from the quality of the outside of the board but overall i mean i mean it's really not that bad the the finger joints you know they're not as tight as they probably could be but you know it's not really something to get nitpicky about but i will say when we do the windsor board which we're about to do right now we'll pull back some layers on this one thankfully this one we could definitely do a 64th of an inch and we'll get to wood so there you go yeah not really i mean i expected to see a lot of knots i expected to see just really bad wood back here but i'm really i'm really surprised by this it looks pretty decent so let's see the windsor board now and peel back this primer [Applause] [Music] it looks about the same i know this one windsor is radiata pine there's different kinds of pine i don't know if this is radiata pine i'm not sure but they look pretty much identical and you got to understand these boards are finger jointed so you're going to get different you know different wood grains and whatnot like you can see the wood grain change right there and even the color change on that windsor board right there especially over a 16 foot board i'm very surprised by this board i was expecting to see a ton of knots a ton of you know just imperfections and it's not really there granted this is a small board but i think you could pretty much plane a whole 16 foot board down and it would look like this but there is a big difference as you've seen in this video and how these boards are prepped and milled and coated and that's why we're going to keep using these boards and that's why i think lowe's need to find another vendor again it's nothing against lowe's it's just come on you could you could find a better board than that or at least tell the people making this board hey stop using so much of that coding square edge it because this is advertised as a square edge board and they want the same kind of money as you know to get a board like this so anyways just thought i would share that anything to help you guys out anything to kind of pass on stuff that i learned you know this is stuff that i've been kind of thinking about and figuring out over the years and i used to go to lowe's like because it's convenient like i said to just grab something but i think those days are pretty much over i'm not going to be getting no one buy material from there anymore because it always makes more work in the end and it just gives me an inferior product so anyways let me know if you guys have any questions and we'll catch you next time

Channel: Finish Carpentry TV

Views: 319,052

Rating: 4.8959012 out of 5

Keywords: finish, carpentry, finishcarpentry, trim, work, trimwork

Id: _X6DHxQfHBs

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021