17 construction lumber
24K views
Jan 24, 2024
17 construction lumber
View Video Transcript
0:00
Construction grade lumber like you see here is made and sold for building house frames mostly
0:11
but few woodworkers realize that it's a great material for making fine woodworking projects
0:17
The trick is choosing your boards from the right pile and then also choosing the correct
0:23
boards from within that pile. So let's take a look. I'll give you a tour of how to get the
0:28
most out of construction grade lumber for your next woodworking project. The first thing to look
0:32
for is the kind of lumber and this sign on the side of the bundle tells you everything you need
0:38
to know. This is a 2 by 10 lumber. The boards are 12 feet long, but most importantly it's kiln dried
0:45
which means it's been heat treated in order to reduce the moisture content. You definitely don't
0:51
want to go with green construction grade lumber. It's usually abbreviated SGRN and that's just
0:59
simply too wet for what we want. The wood is mold prone and it'll almost certainly be covered in
1:04
staining. Also the grade is important to look at. This is number one and number two. So you know
1:11
that in this pile are the kind of boards that you can turn into beautiful furniture. I always like
1:17
to get wider boards because they're cut from larger trees. These two by tens are a good example
1:22
of a pile of wood that's got some real potential to it. This board here that just happens to be
1:27
on top is an excellent one. If I was buying lumber to build a coffee table or a cabinet or or a bed
1:34
or anything like that this would be one of the boards I would choose. It's fairly clear along
1:41
its length and if you look here at the end you'll see that there are sections of this board where
1:47
the grain is getting closer to being perpendicular with the surface of the board. That yields this
1:53
tight grain pattern that you see on either side of the boards. You can split this board in half
1:58
and then you can resaw it to thinner thicknesses and bookmatch that grain pattern together so it
2:05
looks really good. Looking further through the pile these next boards don't look great to me
2:12
There's the obvious problem of the wainy edge so you're not getting the full value for the
2:17
width of board you buy but more importantly you've got these big knots here which might look okay but
2:22
they're almost certain to cause distortion as the wood dries further. One of the best ways to home
2:29
in on great boards for fine furniture is just to simply look at the end grain. As I said before one
2:35
of the nicest grain patterns you can get with construction grade lumber happens when the growth
2:41
rings are as nearly vertical to the surface of the board as possible and this board down here
2:46
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
3:01
are nearly vertical to the surface and that yields a whole lot of nice grain along the whole
3:07
length of this board. Now one thing that you don't want is to use the middle of the board. That goes
3:14
for any kind of lumber you're using but especially when you get into kiln dried wood like this it's
3:19
unstable the growth rings are very curved and so when I process this into wood for furniture
3:25
projects I'll probably remove the center section maybe an inch, an inch and a half, maybe at the
3:31
most two inches wide from the center and then just use the boards on the outside for whatever I want
3:36
The nice thing about construction grade lumber is that it's so inexpensive. It's less than a dollar
3:42
a board foot which is as cheap as furniture grade wood gets. It's indigenous to a lot of parts of
3:48
Canada and it'll help you to create some wonderful things in your home workshop
#Building Materials & Supplies
#Construction & Power Tools
#Home & Garden
#Home Improvement