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Saturday, January 30, 2010

Working with rough lumber

Stores typically sell dressed lumber. Here is a secret however there are times where it would be better to have wood that is 7/8" thick rather than the typical 5/8 to 3/4".

How on earth do you make the wood true? Often there is nearly an inch of crown to take out.

Merv showed me a trick the other week. I was recladding a staircase with oak so I bought enough rough cut lumber from him to do the job. I had always made a cradle and tacked the piece of wood to that and ran it through the tablesaw... which is tedius and takes 2 people.

He said take the factory edge off a piece of plywood and tack that to the board... then run that through the saw with the plywood against the fence. The pieces were only a few feet long, so it was easy to do with only 1 pair of hands.

What a great method... and just 2 little nail holes to fill later!

Thanks Merv--

BTW, Merv sells dried cabinet grade lumber from the store for reasonable rates. You may have to give him a couple of weeks notice though, he starts getting pretty busy this time of year.

L

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