Geo.
I have only used popular a few times for differant small jobs around the shop and I find it to be stable, mills well and looks like it would be a good wood to use for stripping. Can you comment on this? Thanks in advance: Russ.
: Lots of good advice here, but at the end of the day you're probably going to
: have better luck laminating up your blank from a couple of 1 X 6"s.
: Whether your problem is due to moisture or reaction of the wood to
: internal stresses you have relieved, the plain fact is that the lumber
: available today is of low quality. I recently bought a hundred
: "select" 2 x 4s (@$2/stick) which were carefully picked over by
: the yardman who helped me load them. These pieces had very narrow grain,
: meaning they were not plantation trees. Yet many had waney or barky edges
: which indicated they came from very small bolts, perhaps 8-10" in
: diameter. In the past most loggers wouldn't even bother with softwood
: bolts this size. Now there's apparently a market for them. With a little
: twisting and blocking these worked fine for finishing the basement where
: they're major task will be holding up sheet rock. For building boats I
: think we're stuck with "engineered" lumber either as laminated
: wood, plywood or resin-strip-glass composites.

: Because the grain of a log tends to follow the taper of the log, milling a
: bolt with a saw usually cuts across the grain. Very few sawyers are going
: to set up a bolt to mill with the grain rather than parallel with the pith
: because of the extra handling and "waste" involved. So even if a
: decent log is found you're unlikely to find grain that doesn't run out of
: the milled board. I've got poplar, walnut, cherry, maple, ash and red oak
: logs waiting to be milled in the yard once the snow and mud are gone. I'd
: be happy to custom mill you an edge grain blank from any of them. Now, if
: I could only email it.

: Even the native builders had a better lumber supply than we do. The trees
: that washed up on their shores were from old growth forests. To use these
: logs they would split the logs which tend to tear along the grain
: boundries resulting in straight grained blanks.