17 construction lumber

Construction grade lumber like you see here is made and sold for building house frames mostly

but few woodworkers realize that it's a great material for making fine woodworking projects

The trick is choosing your boards from the right pile and then also choosing the correct

boards from within that pile. So let's take a look. I'll give you a tour of how to get the

most out of construction grade lumber for your next woodworking project. The first thing to look

for is the kind of lumber and this sign on the side of the bundle tells you everything you need

to know. This is a 2 by 10 lumber. The boards are 12 feet long, but most importantly it's kiln dried

which means it's been heat treated in order to reduce the moisture content. You definitely don't

want to go with green construction grade lumber. It's usually abbreviated SGRN and that's just

simply too wet for what we want. The wood is mold prone and it'll almost certainly be covered in

staining. Also the grade is important to look at. This is number one and number two. So you know

that in this pile are the kind of boards that you can turn into beautiful furniture. I always like

to get wider boards because they're cut from larger trees. These two by tens are a good example

of a pile of wood that's got some real potential to it. This board here that just happens to be

on top is an excellent one. If I was buying lumber to build a coffee table or a cabinet or or a bed

or anything like that this would be one of the boards I would choose. It's fairly clear along

its length and if you look here at the end you'll see that there are sections of this board where

the grain is getting closer to being perpendicular with the surface of the board. That yields this

tight grain pattern that you see on either side of the boards. You can split this board in half

and then you can resaw it to thinner thicknesses and bookmatch that grain pattern together so it

looks really good. Looking further through the pile these next boards don't look great to me

There's the obvious problem of the wainy edge so you're not getting the full value for the

width of board you buy but more importantly you've got these big knots here which might look okay but

they're almost certain to cause distortion as the wood dries further. One of the best ways to home

in on great boards for fine furniture is just to simply look at the end grain. As I said before one

of the nicest grain patterns you can get with construction grade lumber happens when the growth

rings are as nearly vertical to the surface of the board as possible and this board down here

looks like one of those so let's take a look. As I suspected by just looking at the end grain of the board this one's a keeper. The growth rings

are nearly vertical to the surface and that yields a whole lot of nice grain along the whole

length of this board. Now one thing that you don't want is to use the middle of the board. That goes

for any kind of lumber you're using but especially when you get into kiln dried wood like this it's

unstable the growth rings are very curved and so when I process this into wood for furniture

projects I'll probably remove the center section maybe an inch, an inch and a half, maybe at the

most two inches wide from the center and then just use the boards on the outside for whatever I want

The nice thing about construction grade lumber is that it's so inexpensive. It's less than a dollar

a board foot which is as cheap as furniture grade wood gets. It's indigenous to a lot of parts of

Canada and it'll help you to create some wonderful things in your home workshop