wood shop near me
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Transcript
this video was sponsored by leather honey hey what’s up in this video i’m gonna answer a question that you guys ask all the time probably my most common question and that’s where do i go to buy wood not just wood but wood specifically for furniture and a lot of you guys have been coming here and let me tell you right now stay away just don’t do that it’s not where you want to buy wood don’t worry i’m going to show you where you should be buying wood i’m also going to take you in here and show you a few reasons why you don’t want to buy your wood here so let’s go inside let’s check it out see what they have to offer and then i’m going to take you someplace that’s much much better oh yeah there’s also a link in the video description for our patreon if you want to support the channel in that way just click down there you get extra perks check it out now one thing i learned from many years in big business who am i kidding i’ve never had a real job anyways is that you want to be careful when messing around with these giant companies because they got goon squads and they’ll come after you so you want to keep a real low profile when you’re doing surveillance on this level so we’re going to go in here but we’re going to try and keep it cool so no one notices what’s going on hiding is key and you also want to make sure you’re staying camouflaged so i dressed appropriately where am i right here didn’t even see me now first let me say there’s nothing wrong with these big box stores they’re great and they provide a very valuable service but not really for furniture makers sure they have a ton of wood i mean look at all this wood it’s everywhere but it’s specifically made for one purpose and that’s construction so it’s not really graded for making furniture this plywood for example it’s got this nice big bow in it i would never build a cabinet with this stuff not to mention it’s ridiculously overpriced 72 dollars for a half inch sheet of plywood come on now they do also sell hardwood see hardwood boards right here but their selection is pretty small they’ve got some maple but holy cow that can’t really be the price geez louise and then they’ve got some poplar which technically is a hardwood but it’s pretty soft paint grade wood oh my gosh what the heck is this red oak what is this 1962 come on the name of the game in these big box stores is just get as much out the door as you possibly can which means that quality definitely suffers and if you look in the lumber racks you’re gonna find some questionable things like this plywood i don’t think it’s supposed to be corkscrewed like this i mean maybe if you turn the camera looks okay i guess but look construction grade construction grade construction grade construction grade construction grade construction grade construction grade yeah wannabe construction grade construction grade construction grade construction grade construction grid old man construction grade construction grade siding construction grade siding and hide so after taking a long peruse around the store i decided that we could probably find something better elsewhere so i took off my camouflage left it right here on this stack of plywood and i ran for my life literally i sprinted out of there like there was no tomorrow i’ll be back when i want some ryobi lawnmower or something but for now we’re on to greener pastures and hopefully much much better wood but first we need to make a phone call the hardwood center hello i was calling um i’m at ho right now looking at plywood okay and i’m just trying to figure out if the plywood at people is cheaper i just want the best price do you have cheaper plywood than home it depends on what you’re looking at is it better quality well it should be yeah and then at home all i can find right now is red oak and maple do you have more hardwoods than that yeah i mean i have hickory maple birch okay how far are you away from the albany hotel so do you know where the 34 highway 34 exit is the corvallis yeah okay so are you familiar with wood castle oh yeah right there on the side of highway 34. yeah if you turned in like you’re going to wood castle we’re right there on the right oh okay and you got a pretty wide selection of hardwoods oh yeah all right and i could just come look around so i don’t know any i don’t know any of the lingo if i come in there would you be able to just kind of walk me through and help me figure stuff out what kind of equipment do you have oh i got one of them skiller saws okay you don’t have a table saw no um and i got one of them um the up and down uh the jigsaws okay so our lumber has been surfaced to 13 16 so it’s a 16th over three quarters and has one straight edge okay so you would need a way to straighten out that other edge okay perfect all right well i’m just going to come in if that’s okay and i’ll just talk to you in person yeah yeah that’s fine all right what was your name lee lee all right i’ll see you in a fuelie thank you all right bye now weren’t they friendly and helpful let’s go to the hardwood center and let’s actually buy some real wood [Music] i called on the phone earlier about some smoke and maple hey we’re at my local hardwood center in fact it’s called the hardwood center real original name i know but this place is awesome and as you can see different than home depot there is a crazy amount of wood to choose from here and this is only one aisle they also have this whole aisle here plywood pretty much everywhere and a whole smathering of slabs of various shapes and sizes so wherever you live before you go to home depot get online do a google search find a local hardwood supplier and you’re probably going to find something like this not only is it going to be better quality wood but they’re going to be way more helpful at figuring out what kind of wood you need to do the project you want now i’m going to walk you through some of the things you should look for when you walk into a place like this and start picking out your wood picking out your lumber all right so let’s say you walk into your local hardwood supplier and you want to start picking out some wood whenever i’m looking at pieces of wood there are five main things that i’m looking for before i pick a piece of wood out and take it home with me i’m going to walk you through each one of those five things starting with the twist no not that kind of twist i’m just being silly they’re twisting the board here come here i’ll show you all right the twist it’s one of the first things i look for in a board because it’s one of the hardest things to get rid of if a board has it and that’s where the board is just not on a level plane it means that halfway down or part way down the board it starts to twist so the way that you can see this before you pick out a piece of wood is you just pull the board off the rack and you look straight down it if you can see a nice flat level plane all the way down you’re probably good but if you see the board start to corkscrew a little bit this is something you want to watch out for the reason is if you’re buying thinner stock like 13 16 or three quarter you don’t have a lot of material that you can send it through a jointer and get rid of that twist if you’re using thicker stock like five quarter or six quarter depending on what you’re trying to mill it down to you might be able to get rid of that but the best thing to do is just to set that piece aside and try and find one that doesn’t have a twist the next thing you want to look for is the bow now with the board off the rack like this you’re just going to rotate it boom just like that a quarter turn and you’re going to look down it on this axis and what you’re looking for here is a bow meaning a nice big curve in that board you want to avoid that because also it’s hard to get rid of that on the jointer so if you look down the board and you see a nice straight line one eye open you’re probably pretty good if it looks like a recurve bow that you could shoot arrows through at some unsuspecting deer i’d probably put it back in the rack the next thing i look for with any board is cracks or splits it’s horrible to pick a piece of wood out you take it back to your shop you start working with it and it’s got a split down the middle and it just falls apart so this board it looks nice and strong i don’t see any splits no movement when i push on it check the front and the back this board however it’s got this big split i wouldn’t want to use that um i don’t know if i should have done that my point is check for splits and cracks before you buy your wood because you don’t want to use that when you’re building furniture hello people this video is sponsored by leather honey since 1968 people who care about leather have been trusting leather honey to protect their precious leather goods you see unlike other leather products on the market that just sit on the surface of the leather leather honey is specially formulated to soak deep into the fibers to hydrate to moisturize which means that one application can last up to six months low i have this beautiful leather apron from calvara tools that needs a little pick-me-up so i decided to use this leather honey and give it a good rub down you can tell as soon as you start putting the leather honey on it starts to bring back the vibrance of the original beauty of that leather make it shine make it pop and it’s super easy to apply you can see all the ways that leather honey’s cleaner and conditioner can help prolong the life of your leather by clicking the link below just use coupon code bourbon 20 to save 20 off leather honey’s complete leather care kit next thing i look for is knots because you can have a board like this it looks beautiful it looks nice it looks like something you’d want to make a dining room table out of but if you look at it a little closer it’s not so good see what i did there just make sure you check your boards for knots and voids and sometimes it will look perfectly good on one side and you won’t see the knots until you flip it around to the other side and realize holy cow we might have a little issue and then the final thing that i look for just right off the bat to make sure it’s a piece of wood i want to use is discoloration now this piece has a little discoloration on the front by discoloration i mean just a difference in color of the wood now walnut’s one of the biggest offenders because walnut has something called sapwood well all woods have sapwood but walnut sapwood you can really see so this is the dark more heartwood and then as you get towards the outside of the tree it starts to turn this yellow color that’s the sapwood now i might be able to just trim the sapwood off and get rid of it but depending on the piece sometimes you see both sides of the piece so make sure when you’re looking at the color of your wood you don’t just look at one side but you also look at the other side because as you can see the entire back of this piece is sapwood so if i was doing something like a cabinet and i wanted it dark on both sides and i didn’t check this before i checked out well i’m going to have two different colors and it’s not going to look as good so check for discolorations on both sides of your wood before you buy now one of the biggest differences between a hardwood supplier and a big box store like is moisture content in their lumber you see places like that they’re geared towards construction and for construction grade lumber you’re looking at a moisture content of like 19 or lower but when it comes to building furniture if you try and build a piece of furniture and glue up a bunch of stuff with a moisture content of 19 well as that wood dries out and shrinks everything’s gonna pull apart and your piece is gonna look terrible so you wanna come someplace that is selling wood for the purpose of building furniture because the moisture content in that wood is going to be much much lower and the moisture content you’re looking for is nine percent or lower i typically like my wood to be at a moisture content around six to eight percent now there’s a couple ways that you can determine if the wood is at the correct moisture content well you could ask the owner of the wood supplying place that you’re getting your wood from what moisture content they like to keep the wood at but the best thing to do is just bring a moisture meter with you nobody’s going to be offended if you’re walking around with a moisture meter it’s a smart thing to do just test the moisture of the pieces before you buy and make sure that it’s somewhere between six and nine percent if it’s upwards of 19 then get out of home and go to a hardwood store because you just don’t want that much water in your furniture unless you’re making a water bed but then the water is on top of the furniture it’s not in it that’s a different thing okay cut okay the last thing i want to talk about when you’re picking out wood is how the measurements work because if you’ve only been shopping at the big box store like then you come to a hardwood supplier and the measurements are a little bit different like i said places like home use construction grade material and the way construction grade lumber is measured is like a one by or a two by or a three by or a four by which is funny because a two by four isn’t really two inches by four inches it’s an inch and a half by three and a half inches it’s confusing well regular rough sawn hardwood is just as confusing because instead of saying things like one inch or two inch they say things like one quarter or four quarter or eight quarter or 12 quarter why do they do this i don’t know i think people just like to screw with us and make things more difficult all you really need to know is you just got to add up the quarters so four quarters equals one inch eight quarters equals two inch and so on and so forth now it’s rough sawn lumber which means you’re still probably going to have to do some mill work to get it perfect so keep that in mind when you’re buying the lumber because if you have a project that has to be two inches thick you don’t want to buy eight quarter because it’s not exactly a quarter they just have to be within a sixteenth of an inch give or take so it could be a sixteenth below two inches or a sixteenth above two inches and the reason they aren’t precise is because they’re expecting you’re going to take this wood home and mill it down to the final dimension yourself which is why once you go below one quarter it’s not in quarters anymore they go to 15 16 and 13 16. and you might be saying 13 16 why not just sell three quarter well like i said they’re expecting that you’re going to have to mill it to prepare the wood a little bit and they’re trying to give you a little extra to do that so just keep that in mind if you need an inch and a half piece of material you’re not going to want six quarter you’re probably going to want eight quarters so that after you mill it and join it and everything you can bring it down to an inch and a half which is kind of a pain but it’s just the way things are done so deal with it now the other thing that’s going to be different when you come to a hardwood supplier versus the big box store is how they measure and sell the wood in the big box store it’s all going to be per piece or linear foot which means that you’re paying for each foot that you’re buying if you come to a hardwood supplier most likely they’re going to be selling by the board foot which means the total cubic feet of what you’re buying now there’s a complicated way to figure out the board feet and i know a lot of you in the comments are going to say it’s not that complicated it’s just this plus this minus this times this whatever but as you know from my past videos i hate math so there’s a very easy way for you to figure out the board feet by yourself and that’s just download the board foot easy app i’ll put a link in the video description and it’s just a little app and you pull it up and you put the length and you put the width and you put the thickness and you put how much it costs it’ll tell you the total board feet and it’ll tell you how much you’re going to pay for it and then you can measure the stuff before you take it into the cash register and compare with them because i’ve seen people measure up wood and you get in there and i’m like i got 30 board feet and they’re like you got 35 and i’m like prove it and then we go back out and we measure it and what do you know it’s 40 board feet we were both wrong and i end up paying more my point is you should just check yourself before you get in there so you have an idea of how much it should be so you don’t get ripped off all right let’s talk about plywood for a second because buying plywood can be very confusing because there’s all different types of plywood and thicknesses of plywood and grades of plywood so what do you buy when do you buy it when do you use it and all that jazz well i can’t go through everything because as i said there’s a lot but i can give you a simple breakdown of the grades of plywood so you kind of know what you’re looking for on the various products projects prod the things you’re building remember when you were in grade school and your teacher would give you a grade depending on how well you did a b c d isn’t it weird how there’s no e it just jumps to f anyways i’m getting off topic plywood is graded the exact same way a being the best and d being the worst but it also gets a little more complicated to that because the a or the letter refers to the face side of the plywood or the side that you’re going to use so you could have a piece of plywood that is graded a a meaning it’s an a on both sides that’s pretty much the best plywood you could ever get but typically the back of the plywood is graded with a number not a letter so you could have an a side and then the back would be a one now one is the best for a back but then you could have a two or a three three being the worst see how this is confusing so you could have an a side with a three back meaning it’s really nice on the front but it’s not so nice on the back or you could have a piece of d plywood meaning it’s really horrible on the back and have it be a one on oh no really horrible on the front and then one on the basically if you’re looking for good plywood you want an a side if you want it to be nice on both sides a1 is pretty darn close to aa but if you’re looking for absolute perfection you want an a a sheet of plywood but depending on what you’re doing paint grade you might be able to go down to a b1 or a b2 anyways that’s a basic breakdown of how plywood is graded so don’t go buying some d3 plywood and try and make nice cabinets out of it because you’re not really going to be that happy and if you go into home depot you’re not going to find any aaa plywood you’re going to find some plywood the other thing to think about when you’re buying plywood is the cut of the veneer on the top there are three main cuts well really four main cuts that you can get for veneered plywood the first one would be flat sawn veneer that’s basically where they flat saw just a big long piece off of the tree so it’s continuous grain all the way across the face of the plywood then you have plain sand now that’s going to look like a bunch of boards because they basically cut veneer and strips and they glue it together so when you look at the veneer of the plywood it’s going to look like a bunch of boards smooshed together then you can get rifts on plywood that’s where the the wood veneer is actually cut on the quarter axis but it’s 15 degrees off the quarter axis so you get these long straight lines or you could get quarter sawn which is cut quarter to the axis and you get these flecks and strips bottom line is pick out a piece of plywood you like the look of but just know that for things like riffs on and quarter sawn it’s a cool look but it is going to cost more money well hopefully that was helpful to some extent i want to give a huge shout out thank you to the hardwood center for letting us go in there and be complete goofballs and film in their space i also wanted to mention a few things i didn’t mention when i was there another question i get asked all the time is how do i know how much wood to buy and that’s a tricky one because obviously you don’t want to buy too much wood and get stuck with a bunch of stuff you’re not going to use so what i typically do is i figure out how much wood i need to complete a project and then i add 10 percent to ensure i have a little extra another good thing to do when you find your local hardwood center is to go in there and ask what the return policy is the nice thing about the hardwood center here in oregon is that they let me return full boards that i haven’t cut up yet which means that i can overbuy and whatever i don’t use i just take back in and get a refund which means that i can just buy as much as i want build my project and whatever’s left over just give it back another thing you want to do when you’re looking around and finding pieces is let’s say you find a piece that’s beautiful and it’s more than enough wood that you need but it’s got a crack or a split or not at the end of it well just go ask the people at the front desk if they can cut that piece off because they’re probably not going to sell that board with a knot in there and then you can just buy what’s left over and not have to pay for those voids or knots or cracks all these things are just good practice to do when you’re going in there buying wood like i said i hope this video helps comment down below if you have any more questions and we’ll try and get them answered there’s also links in the video description and um you can go support us on patreon if you want more behind the scenes and direct access to me for questions and answers and coupon codes and live weekly youtube and stuff like that i think that’s it all right until next time bye the hardwood center [Applause] [Applause] parkour you