Wood, nominal sizes, imperial vs metric, what's going on?

[Phil Pascoe]

It used to be that your ceiling board centres were different to your floor board centres, that was fun in a large room.

 

[JohnPW]

I'd just ignore feet and inches as it makes things so complicated. I only heard a tale of someone who wanted a shelf 5 foot plus 9 mm lol. A pair of electronic caliper thingys are useful for checking

Me too. It's using both that's cause of problems, just use metric.

When I read web pages or forum posts with inches and feet, my eyes just glaze over and my brain start to hurt, so I just ignore or just skim through to get the gist, which means I generally avoid American web sites.

 

[petermillard]

Me too. It's using both that's cause of problems, just use metric...

And yet every decent timber yard will know what you mean if you speak in 'woodworker's Esperanto' e.g. the 40 metres of 6" Ogee skirt, 15 metres of 3" architrave and 20 metres of 5"x1" planed I picked up earlier this week didn't raise an eyebrow - and why should it??

 

[Eric The Viking]

When I read web pages or forum posts with inches and feet, my eyes just glaze over and my brain start to hurt, so I just ignore or just skim through to get the gist, which means I generally avoid American web sites.

Your loss, sadly.

Base 10 isn't inherently better -- or worse -- than base 12. Both are useful. If all you're doing is working on new-build property, feet are pointless, however if you're hand-making furniture, or working on older properties, feet are both essential and sensible.

E.

Feet and inches are human-sized, practical measurements, in use since Biblical times. Metres are a bureaucratic mistake. This isn't opinion, it's fact: a metre was originally supposed to be 1/1,000,000 of the distance from the earth's equator to the north pole . However, the French got this wrong and it ended up being entirely arbitrary (probably French pride not allowing them to admit the stupidity of the whole thing).
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition and http://www.nist.gov/calibrations/upload/4998.pdf (note: the Wikipedia link to this PDF is incorrect).

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I often work in metric and sometimes in both, but the main downside in using metric for me is that I'm too used to imperial, and there is absolutely no way can I ESTIMATE in metric. I found a junior school exercise book of mine that had workings in furlongs, chains, rods, poles and perches, pounds, shillings and pence and farthings, fathoms, gallons, quarts, pints, gills and fluid ounces and even gallons pecks and bushells. And I'm under sixty.

 

[bugbear]

I often work in metric and sometimes in both, but the main downside in using metric for me is that I'm too used to imperial, and there is absolutely no way can I ESTIMATE in metric. I found a junior school exercise book of mine that had workings in furlongs, chains, rods, poles and perches, pounds, shillings and pence and farthings, fathoms, gallons, quarts, pints, gills and fluid ounces and even gallons pecks and bushells. And I'm under sixty.

Each and every old unit was perfectly suited to its purpose, but there were hundreds of them.


I've even learnt that the original yard wasn't simply 3 feet, but a separate, independant unit, and that 1/2 and 1/4 yards were in use
as well as feet.

Uniformity has a benefit that outweighs all the separate virtues.

BugBear

 

[Phil Pascoe]

The quarter yard and half yard beer measures, were they?

 

[Reggie]

I would actually like to find a proper lumber yard around here, stuck with b&q and tp (Is there a crying with despair smiley?).

The former will sell you 7000 types of wood cutting implement but only roughly 6 sizes of wood. The latter would like me to submit a quote or phone up to find a price for a single 3m sliver of 3x2 and we all know they're going to overcharge me by 100% just for having the audacity to breathe TP's air.

 

[Eric The Viking]

I would actually like to find a proper lumber yard around here, stuck with b&q and tp (Is there a crying with despair smiley?).

The former will sell you 7000 types of wood cutting implement but only roughly 6 sizes of wood. The latter would like me to submit a quote or phone up to find a price for a single 3m sliver of 3x2 and we all know they're going to overcharge me by 100% just for having the audacity to breathe TP's air.

1. Your profile doesn't say where you are. nobody's asking for the house number, but town or city would help.
2. There's a Google map knocking about with timber merchants on it, and a list.

Otherwise, although I agree about the quality and price of materials from TP and the sheds, woodworkers aren't really their target market. We're generally short of good timber in the UK - a situation that's existed since WWI (the trenches used up a fair bit of it, and the rest of the war effort, then again in WWII and rebuilding afterwards). So it's scarce and expensive, unfortunately.

E.

 

[JakeS]

I would actually like to find a proper lumber yard

1. Your profile doesn't say where you are. nobody's asking for the house number, but town or city would help.
2. There's a Google map knocking about with timber merchants on it, and a list.

3. If you're actually searching for "Lumber Yard", that could be your problem, it's a bit of an American term. If I look online for "Lumber Yard, Grantham", I find... Jewsons. If I look for "Timber Merchant, Grantham" I get results for two timber merchants, a sawmill, and a fourth I've actually not seen before, all within striking distance.

 

[Jelly]

So I was right....profit was the motive....well there's a surprise!

This afternoon I ran 30 cubes (about 1200 4.4m boards) of PAR & 2 split with 38* 150 U/S Russian Redwood, it's just impractical to take the minimum possible off each board, it would also be a pain for the customer to not have uniformity from pack to pack. if you buy our timber, you get it prepared to within 0.2mm of the stated actual dimension (there's one to correspond with each nominal size), everything else is rejected (or re-machined if oversize), that level of accuracy is overkill considering the repeated variations in m/c it will likely undergo between leaving the machine and finally reaching the end user.

SOP is to set it to take it down to specified actual size, and then to align the cutters and timber such that you remove the maximum number of defects... That means getting all the timber facing the appropriate way up whilst it's being fed at great speed, and looking at the incoming packs to see what issues you've got with it, then setting the machine accordingly, and adjusting on the fly according to what you're getting at the outfeed*. You're setting the machine to get the most number of boards out to a given size and quality that you can, not trying to maximize the use of the timber individually... on such a grand scale (and what I'm running is is still pretty small fry really), there's very little comparison if any to milling and preparing your own timber (which is the way to go as a hobbyist or specialist business IMO)

I think I may have gone into too much detail, and lost my point entirely, oh well I'm going to blame the 12 hr shift pattern

*e.g. Pith or Bark on board faces & "Hit"**, try to take an even amount off each side; Cupping, take as little as possible on the convex side (almost always heart side or "Smiley Face Up"), Wind & Bowing [in width-ways plane]; reduce the pressure to the middle rollers and pressure shoes at the first bottom and fence side heads, reduce feed speed, increase pressure to infeed rollers and take an even amount; Bowing [perpendicular to width-ways plane], not a hope in hell of doing anything, the straightening table is 1.8m and the timber is usually 3.0-6.6m, get a supervisor and reject the pack to quarantine if it's too bowed to feed properly.

** i.e. damage to the surfaces, from sawing or transport. this goes with "miss" which is damage caused by the machining process, usually due to the grain direction being less than ideal, or the knives being damaged by staples/nails/embedded WW2 shrapnel/lord knows what else.

 

[Reggie]

The closest big town is Brighton, East Sussex, transport is also another issue. I didn't search for lumber yard, I searched for timber merchants, wood merchants, timber yard, sawmill, sawmills, saw mill, saw mills, etc.

Another thing that puts me off a fair bit is pricing, I have no idea what a good price for wood is, apart from beeNqueue = bad.

 

[Jelly]

Another thing that puts me off a fair bit is pricing, I have no idea what a good price for wood is, apart from beeNqueue = bad.

Softwoods or Hardwoods?

 

[Reggie]

Either really, to start off with soft wood but it will depend from project to project and will include sheet materials too. At the moment I'm really just gouging scrap bits of pine and plywood to get used to my tools on a couple of small projects. I know that covers a lot of types of wood and there's a lot of the stuff out there.

Where do you guys buy your wood from? It might give me some idea on price ranges.