Wood recycling

[Steliz]

Hi,

I don't know if this subject has been covered as the search function doesn't seem to work for me.

I am a beginner woodworker and I have a limited space workshop (shed) and hand held tools only and I have been considering recycling old/broken hardwood furniture to make smaller items but I don't know if this is a good idea.
For example, someone near me was offering a sheesham wood sideboard for next to nothing. It has a chunky top which is rough sawn in a 'rustic' style. The finish has to be removed which could be done through a thicknesser (once I buy one) but will the varnish/oil clog up the blades or damage the machine? Also, I spotted some mahogany on ebay near me but a lot of it has varnish on (disassembled furniture).

Is it worth the effort to try and clean this up and re-use it?

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Try the "search" in the User Tools on the right hand side panel.

 

[novocaine]

yes it's worth it, get an old handplane and devote it to stock clean up i.e. removing finish. you can make it a scrub plane, if you really want to do it with power tools buy a second hand power plane.
don't waste your time with a thicknesser, learn to do it with hand tools first.
take a trip along to walton lea and have a chat with them about what they do with recycled furniture.

 

[AndyT]

Of course reusing old wood is a good idea - most of my projects have been done that way. It's a terrible waste to skip or burn good wood.
Over the years I have made two beds, several bookcases, boxes, tables etc.
In the projects section I've written up a Victorian convertible chair/steps, a small chest of drawers and a Japanese style box, which all started with reclaimed wood. And I don't own a planer/thicknesser.

Don't hesitate!

 

[Sheffield Tony]

Can I sneak in a quick plug for this:

http://www.communitywoodrecycling.org.uk/

 

[custard]

With breaker antiques your timber supply will dictate your projects, rather than the other way around. In addition you need a fairly big piece of donor furniture to yield a fairly small project, ie a sideboard gets re-born as a jewellery box!

As long as you're okay with that then go for it. Don't worry about stripping old finishes, I've yet to meet the finish that can resist a bench plane!

Good luck.

 

[Brandlin]

Can I sneak in a quick plug for this:

http://www.communitywoodrecycling.org.uk/

i've hunted high and low for anywhere doing this kind of thing local to me. nearest place is 90 km away and they cant tell me over te phone what they have in stock. went there once and all they had was very battered construction 2x4s still with nails in.

i applaud the intent and would even help, but there is nothing in the whole north wales, chester, even wirral and liverpool areas.

my experience with ebay is that people want tip top prices for junk an its often not the species they claim.

i wander down to my local council tip and there are skipfulls of wood (admittedly a lot of it chipboard) but they wot let anyone take it or even buy it. i've almost cried at some of the things i've seen in there.

 

[Tasky]

i've hunted high and low for anywhere doing this kind of thing local to me. nearest place is 64 km away and they cant tell me over te phone what they have in stock.

That the one in Preston?
I think they have one in Manchester too, about an hour away from Flint. My own is in the Abingdon area, about the same distance.

Downside is that they only have whatever they have in stock, but this changes so quickly that maintaining an up to date stocklist for dissemination is somewhat impractical.
Upside is of course the prices, especially if they have some bulk deals on... and if Paul Sellers hasn't been through there the week before!!

 

[novocaine]

same boat here Brandlin, nearest is manchester (granted only 20 miles but still not worth my time)
there is a place in widnes that does some of it, but it's mainly structural stuff of builder overstock and they only have a small amount of reduction over buying new stock with known treatment from my local timber yard.
they are a private enterprise, a profit is the goal so you can't really blame them.
occasionally stuff comes up on freecycle and Warrington has a reasonably active forum for it although there was some backlash about taking and not giving.

 

[ED65]

I don't know if this subject has been covered as the search function doesn't seem to work for me.

I can't get the internal search to work reliably for me either but that's okay, you can search the site externally using Google and it works brilliantly.

The finish has to be removed which could be done through a thicknesser...

Oh you don't need a thicknesser for that. You can start with rough-as-rats wood and get it flat and smooth using hand tools, in a reasonable amount of time and without too much sweating, as long as you use the right hand tools for each step. This is coarse-medium-fine progression that Chris Schwarz has written about (but embodied in older writings long long before).

A jack or no. 5 set up traditionally, or a roughing plane AKA scrub plane, would take the roughest surface down to reasonably flat with just a couple of minutes' work.

A thicknesser is certainly handy and saves a lot of time and effort in the long run, but in the meantime the traditional methods and progressions work as well as they always have.

Also, I spotted some mahogany on ebay near me but a lot of it has varnish on (disassembled furniture).

On already very flat stock varnish can be removed really effectively by scraping, just a couple of minutes can tackle something the size of a kitchen table. But if you're intending on planing the wood anyway the plane(s) can take the varnish off for you too.

Is it worth the effort to try and clean this up and re-use it?

Abso-frickin-lutely

 

[Brandlin]

yeah preston and manchester places are my nearest... preston says its 64km away but more like 90 cos sadly the country doesnt allow you to drive the way the crow flies... there a sea in the way - or an estuary or two at least! the machester one is a pig to get to most days with the m56 and m60 traffic. neither of them are 'drop in and see what they have' kinda places, and they cant give ANY idea of stock over the phone to make it worth the round trip.

i absolutely applaud what organisations like this do. dont get me wong. but i laugh when you see them advertising as 'nationwide' or some tv show talks about these places being 'everywhere'.

i have no problems with people making a profit either. sometimes we think second hand wood should be free or at least cheap... but add up the cost of a yard, sorting, denailing, stacking, selling, utilities etc and it all adds up. sadly that can mean its not much cheaper than new.

what i am VERY angry about is my local council's approach to things in skips. i get uoted issues with "health and safety" or "insurance" which is utter bollocks. and i can say that with some conviction - i'm and Engineering and Safety Director for 15 years and there is nothing that prevents them selling on goods... they just dont want to and use a cop out excuse rather than do some homework.

 

[Tasky]

what i am VERY angry about is my local council's approach to things in skips. i get uoted issues with "health and safety" or "insurance" which is utter pineapples. and i can say that with some conviction - i'm and Engineering and Safety Director for 15 years and there is nothing that prevents them selling on goods... they just dont want to and use a cop out excuse rather than do some homework.

But if anything goes wrong - from you slipping off the side of the skip, to catching yourself or someone else with an errant splinter, to you accidentally bandsawing into a hidden nail - there's a chance you could try to sue them and this is how they cover their backsides.
Basic H&S mentality...

 

[Steliz]

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I'm still building a tool collection (no planes yet) and I considered the thicknesser first as I have to do most work outside due to the size of my work space. This is limiting due to the weather, of course.

novocaine - I think I've been to the place in Widnes you mentioned and I couldn't find anything worthwhile (once I'd waded through the mud!).

 

[novocaine]

that has nothing to do with H&S and everything to do with Insurance, as in they don't have the cover to let you do it.

H&S is rarely to blame for stopping things being done, the underlying issue is almost always that some underwriter has worded the insurance so they can worm out of paying out in the event of an incident.

anyways, completely off topic. sorry for that.

back to the OP, gatewarth tip was flogging stuff and so was earlstown, it might be worth a visit.

edit: buy a handplane, perfect for this weather, where you can work up a sweat to keep warm. if you have the space to store a thicknesser you have the space to plane

if you need any help getting it sharp and what you need to do for that give me a shout and I'll try to meet up and show you my completely wrong approach.

 

[Brandlin]

what i am VERY angry about is my local council's approach to things in skips. i get uoted issues with "health and safety" or "insurance" which is utter pineapples. and i can say that with some conviction - i'm and Engineering and Safety Director for 15 years and there is nothing that prevents them selling on goods... they just dont want to and use a cop out excuse rather than do some homework.

But if anything goes wrong - from you slipping off the side of the skip, to catching yourself or someone else with an errant splinter, to you accidentally bandsawing into a hidden nail - there's a chance you could try to sue them and this is how they cover their backsides.
Basic H&S mentality...

Thats a fallacy. it's absolutely NOT basic health and safety mentality at all.

All that is required is that the risk is managed to an acceptable level. there are any simple cheap ways of doing this. I am not advocating jumping into skips full of trash. It would be very easy to set up a system whereby items could be exchanged or even bought and it's entirely legal and insurable. Yes it takes a little effort and some different thought. but there is no reason why your local skip should be any more dangerous than walking around your local builders yard with all their stock laid out.

You already have to lift your item over a 1m high rail to drop it into the skip. and i regularly see people struggle and drop things. thats a bigger risk than leaving large items in designated spaces so that others might retrieve them.

In another example they have elsewhere in the yard free compost that people can come and collect. they give them forks and shovels, to fill their own bags and i often see people filling dustbins or waterbutts that they then really cant lift into their cars. More worryingly is that this pile of compost used to be over 20 feet in height and they had people shovelling from the face of it and watching the face collapse. That's insane and i have intervened and REFUSED to leave until they reduced the height of the pile with machinery until it doesn't pose a crush risk. Several people a year in the UK are crushed under grain, sand and other 'fluid' solids because they dont understand the risk of collapse and the mass of the material above them.

And dont get me started on the basic traffic control and the risk of pedestrians getting hit by vehicles.

the problem with your response tasky is that its a glib short hand often used by people who do not actually understand the law and HSE regulations and its an increasingly common excuse for not actually understanding the risk and designing some of it out.

 

[Brandlin]

and yes, sorry to the OP for straying wildly off-topic.

 

[novocaine]

hay look, the same song sheet and only 30 miles between us.

 

[Steliz]

Thanks for the suggestions. Gatewarth tip is quite close to me so I'll pop in.

I did a beginners woodworking course at Cheshire Woodworking which was fantastic and very rewarding. Part of that was tool sharpening and I've ordered some sharpening stones off t'internet so I just need a plane and some wood now . I'll give you shout if I need a 'different' approach, cheers.

 

[Tasky]

the problem with your response tasky is that its a glib short hand often used by people who do not actually understand the law and HSE regulations and its an increasingly common excuse for not actually understanding the risk and designing some of it out.

The problem with your wall of text there is that, while absolutely correct, it still requires an actual effort on the part of the company.
It requires documentation, regulation, enforcement, auditing, inspection and quite probably money... particularly when dealing with members of the public, who need protecting from their own lack of common sense as much as anything else.

It only takes one silly incident from one individual to trigger off reams of this carp, to the point where we cannot take off our hard hats if our jackets are wet in case the wet sleeve hits us in the eye... yes, really... and since we're a joint venture, this is pretty much a UK wide thing across our whole industry.

Just saying No is the quickest, easiest, fairest, most catch-all option available, which is why so many companies simply adopt that to save any fuss, and why I said it was the basic H&S mentality, rather than any kind of good practice.

 

[Lons]

The original waste tip system prior to the local authorities taking them over worked very well and produced an income for the same LAs as the day to day running of the sites was contracted to the highest bidder who undertook to keep the sites clean safe and tidy as well as sorting the items. The contractors recycled anything saleable which included wood and old furniture and were quite happy to sell just for the asking, it was quite lucrative for all involved, much of the stuff being sold on at local boot sales.

Following upgrading the tips to larger recycling centres it's very difficult to buy anything even if it's destined for landfill and I understand the fear of the LAs that they be pursued by "no win no fee" lawyers for compensation should some poor soul get a splinter in their finger but instead of contracting the centres out for revenue they run them at a cost and of course now see them as a soft option by imposing a tip tax in many areas which has increased the costs of cleaning up increased fly tipping.

Can only speak of my area of course where like most, the LA is run by a bunch of incompetent idiots.

Appologies to the OP for staying of track and yes, grab all the solid reusable wood you can get your hands on, I have loads of the stuff which these days would be impossible to get, it makes me weep to have seen all the old chunky bits of oak, walnut elm teak and mahogany that has been dumped and gone forever.
It's worth the small amount of effort needed to clean it up and puts a smile on my face every time I expose some beautiful grain hidden by coats of heavy polish and grime.

Bob