A Thousand Dollars Worth of Wood || Buying Wood Online


online wood

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hey so last year I did a video on buying wood what you should be looking for where you should be buying it from and specifically where you should not be buying it from this not where you want to buy wood but after doing that video we got so many comments from people saying that’s great I would love to not have to buy my wood from but that’s all that’s available and then on top of that we got a ton of questions from people saying well what about buying wood online is there a good source where you can just order wood and have it shipped directly to your door and I got to tell you when I heard this I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard how could it be financially viable to order wood online and have it delivered to your door is that even a thing so that’s what this video is all about is there a good source online to order hardwood have it delivered to your door so this is what we did a little experiment we did a Google search just like any Joe Schmo out there would do to try and find places to buy wood online we found five pretty good sources that we could order hardwood from so we placed some orders now from each Source we ordered roughly the same quantity of wood now I say roughly because some sources only offered certain lengths sizes widths so we tried to get the same amount of board feet in the same species from each of the five locations but here’s the catch we’re not going to tell you where we ordered it from yet we’ve devised a little test we split it up into six main categories shipping times let’s say I need wood next week is there even an option to order wood online and get it here that Quickly cost I mean how expensive is this going to be the moisture of the wood for that we got a few different moisture meters now we bought a couple cheap ones on Amazon this one you just set on top of the wood and you can set it between hard wood and soft wood it’ll tell you the moisture this one has these little prongs it was broken when it came out of the box not going to use that one and then we have the Orion from Wagner now this is the moisture meter I like to use on a daily basis and the nice thing about this one is you can actually set it for the specific species that you’re using the Aesthetics of the wood how do the boards look right out of the package do they look straight are they twisted are they warped do they have a giant bow to them are they the same color are these boards that they sent us going to look good together the accuracy of the order now all these websites allowed us to pick our width and our length and our thickness but how accurate is what we ordered to what actually shows up in the mail and the usability of the wood when it arrives now what we mean by that is are the boards ready to use right out of the package now from all the companies we ordered them as M as we could possibly get them so that means they either coming S4s which is surfaced on four sides or if they didn’t have that option we at least got S3s but that should mean that they come with a perfectly straight line on at least one side we’re going to rank each one of these five sources based on those six categories and we’re going to give them a score and at the end of this video we’re going to tell you what company scored the best and in our opinion if you’re going to order wood online where you should be doing it from now you might be saying well how are we going to keep all of these different companies separate well we’re going to color code each one we’ve assigned a random color to each company so that we can keep it straight and we’re going to show you which color is ranking best as we go through this video so without any further Ado let’s go buy some wood so after pulling out my credit card and going online the wood started to pour in the first box to show up was our red box it only took 6 days to get here then the green box that took 8 days to show up at the shop door followed by our Orange Box at 12 days nearly 2 weeks weeks after that was our blue box this one took 16 days and then coming in dead last was our silver box at 19 days from the day that we ordered it to the day that it was delivered now I know that this video is about buying wood online but in any good experiment you should have a control so we came down to our local wood buying Source this is the hardwood Center if you’re local to the wamt valley this is on highway 34 between Cor of Alison Albany this is personally where I get all of my wood so we thought we’d come put it to the test and just you know see what the moisture is here take a look at the boards 6.9 which is right where you want to be somewhere between 6 and 8% is perfect just double check it with this other one 7.1 so we still seen a little bit of variation there we got 5.5 7.3 so everything seems to be right in the area that you want it to work with so now that we have our control and we know that the moisture is relatively in that level that we want we’re going to go through all of the other samples and see how they compare to what you can get locally now to be as accurate as possible we tried to test the moistures the second we got them delivered right off of the truck 7.4 5.8 8.1 5.4 it was kind of like Christmas each day a box would show up I got to open it up pull out all the wood and test those moistures I got to tell you part of me was rooting for one of these orders just to be really bad like moisture up in the High Teens or 20s but lucky for the various companies none of them were too bad although we did find a 13.9 in case you’re keeping tabs that was from our green box one day I was out of the shop when a box showed up thankfully Craig stepped in to take the moisture readings before it sat in my shop and had time to acclimate The Orange Box was right where it needed to be at 7% okay all right this one just showed up we taped off the brand name so you can’t see we’re going to open this thing up and we’re going to get a moisture reading fresh off of the truck right out of the truck Wagner says 9% and the cheaper one from Amazon 6.5 we started ordering wood almost 20 days ago and this is the last one to arrive smells like Oak 9.6 7.5 7.7 6.4 7.9 6.1 all of these boards are beautiful let’s see how they look now that all of our orders have finally arrived we can start comparing them to one another as far as did we get what we ordered and how do they look aesthetically so we’re going to do that with the last one that showed up but the first one to get judged on appearance now right out of the box these look very very nice now we ordered the longest length that we could order which was 48 in I’m going to do a little test here slightly over what we ordered and then we ordered 5 1/2 in wide right at 5 and 5/8 which I appreciate they give you a little bit of Tolerance in case you need to you know get an exact size and these are right at 1316 and they seem very uniform all the way down the other thing I noticed right off the bat is these are so smooth it’s not like they were sent through a planer it seems like they were sent through a planer and then a drum sander but let’s lay them all out here and see how they look together now on this particular website you have to order by lengths not board feet but we did the math to figure out how much board foot we got and it was right at 9.17 so we’re going to do a quick little calculation here we ordered 9.17 board feet we got 9.5 on the dot so just over which is always nice and the thing I notice immediately is how nice these joints come together we ordered S4s and this is definitely S4s I mean I could glue those up right now and get really even seams all the way across they’re all the same thickness I don’t feel one that’s you know wider or thicker than the others all in all for Aesthetics and what we ordered it’s pretty accurate okay this is our second to last order to arrive now at this particular supplier you could order by the board feet and we ordered exactly 10 board feet now you could also order by the length and we ordered 7 Footers and then as far as width goes it gives you a tolerance 5 to 6 in on tolerance looking at them right out of the box I see some immediate issues first of all this one has a pretty severe bow in it I can see that right away this one boy this has got a lot going on we got this giant sapl line you can see that it’s got so many bug holes throughout this entire thing now if I was making a really rustic piece of furniture and I wanted that it’d be one thing but I’d expect all the pieces to match we ordered S3s on these and we actually had them straight line one side but it should be surfaced on the two flat sides pretty well I’m seeing a big planer Mark right there on this board if you flip this one over it’s not even planed all the way which means means this entire corner I’m going to lose thickness on that because that’s thinner than everywhere else let’s flip this one over this is the best board in the bunch as far as how it looks but my question is I have two straight edges here if you push those up against each other you can see a huge gap down the middle which means that those are just not jointed very well so I’m going to have to do extra work on top of this this to Mill These and get them to a point that I want to work with them not only that I’m probably going to end up cutting all of this sapwood out so I’m going to lose a lot of wood but all that being said let’s do a quick measurement and see if we even got the amount of wood that we ordered we ordered 7 Footers this is 73 in we ordered exactly 10 board feet and we got 11.9 now before you’re like what the heck that’s more than you ordered but they’re shorter the reason is remember I said we ordered between 5 and 6 in if you look at these boards they’re all well over 5 to 6 in all right that one’s almost eight this one’s over eight this one’s over 7 so we did get wider boards which is great and we ended up with more board feet than we ordered but the fact that we didn’t get the lengths that we wanted that’s a huge deal because most of the time you order the length based on what you’re building and if it’s 11 in is shorter than what you order well that’s a problem all in all this one’s getting a pretty low score in the ranking nope oh hey I want to give a big thanks to the sponsor of our video PDS debt now there was a time in my life where I was living paycheck to paycheck and believe it or not I was in debt and one of the best days of my life is when I finally got all that debt paid off and I could finally start to live my life again if you’re somebody that struggles with debt PDS is here to help they got customized programs for anybody struggling with credit card debt personal loans medical bills collections if you’re paying debt every month and you’re not seeing those balances go down well this program is for you here’s how it works if you got a debt in a lot of different places and you’re paying 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around and try later this is something you want to take care of right now there’s no coffee in this all right this is our Orange Box this is another one that we were able to order longer lengths you could order up to 7 ft we ordered four 44 but it says on their website that the average for 44 is 3/4 I don’t love that 1316 is more accurate in my opinion cuz it gives you a little bit of extra so if you have to Mill it down you can get down to 3/4 this is right at 3/4 which means that if we’re going to Mill this at all we’re going to wind up below 3/4 which isn’t ideal right away I’m seeing some issues these are all a little bow except for this one but if we flip it over it’s got a slight bow to it this one however if you look there’s a huge gap over here and a huge gap over here which means that we’re going to have to cut out a lot of material to get this to a square board if I flip these around straight line to straight line we’ll test that that’s actually not a terrible joint for the length of the board there’s a little bit of a gap in the middle here but for the most part like you could join those two boards together you’d have no problem running them through a table saw now from an Aesthetics point we got a giant knot here which I don’t love this board is very very light where this board is very red pretty similar Cathedral grain which that matches but the color difference between that board and these two this has a giant Chunk on the straight lined cut I would not pick that board if I was picking the wood out myself all that aside Let’s test and see if we got what we ordered now we ordered 7t lengths we ordered right at 9.52 board feet if you consider 3/4 to be 44 which is what we had to order on the website we got 11.38 board feet so we did get quite a bit more board feet than we ordered but you’re going to have to cut a lot of this out to even make it workable it’s bow it’s different colors not thrilled with it I’d rather go pick out my own wood in the store this is our green box now this is another site that we were able to order up to 7f Footers I even think you could get them longer on this website if you wanted and we were able to order S4s which means they should be surfaced on all four sides which I can tell you right away that they are these ones they just look nicer right out of the box those seam are fairly good there’s a little unevenness to the boards but nothing like those last couple that we looked at I will say these seams are not quite as nice being S4s as some of the other ones but they’re close enough you may be able to just take a light pass off with the table saw and get them to where you want them to be I did notice however moving this one over there is a missed spot down here that the planer left that’s a little bit lower so you’d have to cut that out or plan the whole board down but all in all for me an S4s they look fairly good so that’s nice now let’s see if we actually got what we ordered as far as board feet now we ordered 9.62 board feet let’s do the math real quick we got 9.92 board feet so just over what we ordered so there’s a little bit of wiggle room all in all we got what we ordered and we could build something out of this next all right this is our last box of wood this is actually the first one to show up this came just 6 days after we ordered it so that’s a huge plus right there now this is another site where you could only get up to 48 in so you are limited in your lengths from this particular supplier you are however able to order S4s which is nice cuz it should be surfaced on all four sides which I can tell right away it is now for the most most part these look pretty good as far as whether or not they’re warped a couple of these have a little spring to them flip that over I’m seeing some huge variations in color on this one these three boards right here if I had to just guess they look like red oak now one way to really tell is on the end Red Oak has a way more open pore than white oak so this one I’m pretty sure is white this one is red it’s just hard to tell but I would say this is a red oak almost 100% guarantee which means that what we have to do to take our measurements on what we got unfortunately is remove those three boards we got exactly 10 board feet from this particular company 48 in length 15 we got exactly half which makes sense five board feet on the dot of what we ordered now I would imagine that with this company if you contacted them and said hey you sent me half red oak half white oak I would assume they would send you the correct wood so let’s try and put that aside for a second and just look at the quality of the wood and just looking for Aesthetics well these three red oak boards go together very nicely and for the most part the seams come together great I can tell I wouldn’t have to do any work on the Joiner to get those to hook together they’re definitely pled and it feels like sanded or they have really sharp planer blades so they’re nice and smooth there’s no checking or marks as far as that goes I did notice on this one board we do have a crack in it so that’s unfortunate so we’d have to cut that part out so that’s not great but just looking at these boards the seams look really nice um color variation is something to look at at this has got a really light spot to really dark this one’s more neutral this one’s more Cathedral grained I wouldn’t pick out these boards to go together but as far as the quality of the wood it looks pretty good but it is pretty disappointing to get half of the wrong species so that’s definitely going to be some negative marks it did ship pretty fast though and now the moment you’ve been waiting for I got to tell you this is pretty interesting now we have ranked each one of these wood sources and we’ve given them a score and the way we came up with a score is there’s basically six different companies that we used for this experiment if you count our local wood Source the hardwood Center and there’s six different categories we got shipping we got moisture we got accuracy of order we’ve got Aesthetics we’ve got cost and we’ve got usability meaning are you able to use the wood right out of the box we’re going to rank each one of those categories 1 through six now you want the highest score when it comes to this so you want to be ranked number six if your wood is the best we’re going to give a score for each category we’re going to add up the scores for the entire thing and we’re going to tell you which company ranked the best so starting with shipping all right when it comes to shipping in last place getting only one point was our silver batch right here it took 19 days for this to arrive that’s nearly 3 weeks weeks from the day we ordered it for it to show up to our door which means you got to wait around a long time to get this wood after that was this one over here our blue box it took 16 days so just over 2 weeks for that to show up after that was The Orange Box it took 12 days for that to arrive after that was the green that took 8 days and then the one that came super fast was our red box that only took 6 days to show up so that gets a whopping Five Points Four Points three points two points and one point and we also give our local wood Source six points because well you can just go pick it up the same day so they got the most points moisture when it comes to moisture well the worst on the moisture scale was our green box with an average moisture in the box of 99.27% now that’s not crazy high but it is a little higher than I like I like the wood to be between 6 and 8 and that was just outside next was our silver box at 88.2% after that was the blue box at 7.65 that’s a great moisture uh after that was our red which was 7.5 our winner for our onine online ordering is The Orange Box and that was an average moisture of 7.45% and then our local Source the average we found there was 7.4 so was actually a little bit better than everything that showed up in the mail now we get to the accuracy of the order was what we ordered actually what showed up in the box now coming in at last place was the red box cuz you remember half what they sent us wasn’t even what we ordered after the red box it was the blue box we didn’t even get the length we wanted with what we ordered The Orange Box which is this one right here this one was right at 3/4 of an inch now it did specify on the website that the average is 3/4 but if you’re ordering 44 you expect to have a little wiggle room to account for your Milling process uh coming in at number four was our green box it was pretty darn close to what we ordered in fact it was just over the board feet that we ordered so really nothing wrong there and then number five we gave to our Silver Box because every single board was perfect it was just thicker than what we ordered it was just wider than what we ordered it was just longer than what we ordered I mean everything in this box was great as far as what we were expecting to show up so that gets five and as for accuracy we gave a six to the hardwood Center because well you’re going to pick out exactly what you want so of course it’s going to be what you ordered so that gets a six now on to Aesthetics coming in last place when it comes to Aesthetics was the blue box as far as how the wood looks this was by far the worst it looked terrible I would have been very unhappy if I opened this up and expected to just be ready to use it for a project so that came in last place after that has to go to our red box because again half of the wood wasn’t even what we ordered well half of it was red oak and that’s ugly old person wood after them was The Orange Box now this one wasn’t terrible there was a little bit of you know bowing on the edges which didn’t look great we would have to cut that off but there was that one very very light board that was completely different looking than the other two after that was the green box for the most part this looked pretty decent it was consistent color through out the only reason this didn’t come in first is there was just slight variation with the grain pattern and then coming in first place as far as Aesthetics was our Silver Box I mean everything looked really nice the boards were sanded smooth to the touch there was no bowing or warping the seams were really nice um they were all a consistent color and length and size so when it came to aesthetic they nailed it pretty good on that Silver Box on on to usability now I’ve already touched on some of the usability as far as the Bode and the edges and everything coming in last place was our Orange Box now this is the one that had even though we ordered a straight line on it the straight line just wasn’t good when you put two straight lines together there was still a big gap in the middle we were definitely going to have to run this back over the Joiner so why pay extra for a straight line when we’re going to have to do the work ourselves right behind that was the blue box no surprise there it was the ugliest wood and they missed some spots on the planer so we were going to have to plane it down even further it had that strip of buge eaten wood that we were going to have to cut out so before we could even get to using this wood it’s still needed a lot of work right behind that well it was the red box again because you’re expecting the right amount of wood for your project you pull that out and it’s going to be pretty hard to use when half the wood is the wrong species following that is our green box now I was you know pretty okay with this one the straight lines seem pretty good for the length of the board I thought you could get this in clamps without too much struggle as far as usability goes the Silver Box again all those seams were perfect when you push them together you could hardly even tell they were there you run your hand across the top there weren’t any big bumps or ridges and then following that of course back to the hardwood Center I mean you’re going to going to go pick out those boards in person you’re just not going to beat it as far as being able to use them right away so that one gets a six cost now this is a big factor for a lot of people because you can kind of manipulate wood if it’s not quite there yet to get it to where you want it and that’s just Sweat Equity but we only have a certain amount of money so if cost is important to you listen up now coming in first place we’re going to do first to last on this one because the last one woo it’s up there coming in first place no surprise is our control our local Source at $7.95 cents a board foot now this one’s cheaper because you’re not paying for shipping which we did factor into the board foot price so with our online sources in first place would be the blue box it was $12.58 cents a board foot but we know it also had some other issues after the blue box was the red box at $20.39 a board foot but that number gets drastically skewed If you eliminate the red oak that they sent us and you just factor in the white oak but we’re not going to do that give them the benefit of the doubt $20.39 a booot after that it is the green box at $21.95 a board foot followed by The Orange Box at $268 87 cents a board foot and hold on to your butts the silver box came in last place at $358 a board foot yikes now we’re going to add up all these points and give you a overall winner here in just a second based on the points alone but before we do that I thought I should probably tell you where the heck this wood even came from now as I mentioned at the beginning of the video we just did a Google search trying to find places to buy wood online and the easiest places that we found were Rockler Woodworking Beard Brothers fine hardwood the total wood store woodworker source and North Castle Hardwoods now are there more places out there to buy wood absolutely but these are the ones that came up first so that’s what we went with and then of course we have our local control the hardwood Center so now that you know where the wood came from let’s find out who the overall winner is all right coming in last place with 15 points our blue box from Woodworkers Source now this was the cheapest wood by booot from the ones we ordered online excluding our local Source the hardwood Center however it took 16 days to show up and was about the ugliest wood in all the Box boxes that we saw I mean I would just be very unhappy to receive this wood for a project if you remember there was that bug Chew in there and light spots and chatter and a whole mess of problems so I’m sorry woodworker Source you came in last place second to last place was our Orange Box now this was the total wood store it was a little expensive 2687 aboard foot the moisture honestly wasn’t bad it won the moisture Conta test from our online sources it got five points for that it did take 12 days to ship so that’s almost 2 weeks but when it came to the Aesthetics we had some warped boards there was that one really light board that I probably wouldn’t even use so you got to throw that whole thing out so all in all it got second to last now after that there was a tie between our silver box and our red box the red box was from Rockler Woodworking and the silver box was from North Castle Hardwoods now they both had a lot of issues the silver box for example it took 19 days to show up so if you ordered this for a project that you want to do anytime soon well you’re going to be standing around the mailbox waiting a long time but on the upside the wood was beautiful it won almost every category as far as accuracy Aesthetics usability the moisture however was a little bit on the high side 8.2 but nothing too scary the Rockler box well we know it had all sorts of problems the big one being half of it wasn’t the right species which is really surprising because I’ve worked with Rockler for years they’ve been a sponsor of the channel I can’t say enough good things about their tools their customer service so that’s why I’m pretty confident if you were to contact Rockler and say hey half my order was wrong I don’t think they would have any problem shipping you the right material that doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have to be waiting for it to show up in the mail the good news is they shipped the fastest we got this only 6 days after we placed the order and the wood as far as accuracy and usability scored very high so that’s why they didn’t come in too far down they tied for second place as far as our online orders now first place for the wood that we ordered online based on points our green box this is Beard Brothers fine heart woods now for the most part these boards looked great they were S4s so they were surfaced on all four sides one of the sides was even sanded like up to 180 so they feel really nice to the touch there wasn’t any significant problems there wasn’t any crazy bowing or twisting or cupping the edges looked good the price well it wasn’t the most expensive but it was $21.95 a board foot but of all the places you could buy online based on our different categories Beard Brothers fine Woodworks Hardwoods woodworking wood that you buy online whatever the heck you guys are called you did pretty good now Beard Brothers find Hardwoods seem to be the winner as far as the length that you could get it’s S4s it’s sanded it’s nice so all in all not a bad option but the bottom line is you have to make that decision for yourself hopefully this was an informative video check the links in the video description we will link every single one of these stores so you can go take a look for yourself but if you can find that local wood Source by local pick out your own Lumber and build something awesome now what the heck am I going to do with all this white oak …

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