buying hardwood

A very common scene in my life. I am at the hardwood dealer buying lumber. I am there buying two different types of wood, cherry and soft maple. Both are four quarter material. That means that they are 1" thick and they are unfinished meaning not smoothed. when I surface plane and true up their faces they will yield a thickness of 7/8" or less definitely 3/4". The measuring tool can be seen laying across the lumber, this is the tool the tally man uses to measure the amount of board feet in a particular stick of wood. Look at the close up. The SM means wood type here soft maple. The 10 means the length of the stick, and the 7 is the quantity of board feet which for the maple I will pay somewhere around $3.50/bdft making this stick around $25.00 check my math on that. On the tool, the first column of numbers indicates the lenght of the board. As you go across you can see the opposite edge of the board falls in the seven square. That tells the tally man that their are seven board feet in this stick to charge the customer. What I want to point out is the area of margin here. So I try to buy boards that are on the wider side of that 1 inch margin. This board is also tallied prior to going into a shelf in a lot when their is a greater chance for error, so this needs to be monitored. Also you can see that their is no row for an eight foot piece of lumber, which is very common. The tally man has to divide the 16 row in half in his or her head when tallying the stick, yet another chance of error. And what about boards that vary in their widths as you go down the lenght. The following is why I buy the wood myself at Kidder Blasidell.


1. buyer has to be able to spot quality wood, and know when to buy what by seeing the quality of what is on the shelf. I compare it to a tobacco buyer walking through a warehouse and selecting the bails of tobacco.
2. buyer needs to know what wood is most needed for what we are to build next, so he can chose to not buy a wood that is of poor quality and wait until next time when the available selections might be better.
3. buyer needs to be able to identify straightness in boards
4. buyer needs to be able to chose widths that are on the larger side of the widht margin
5. buyer need to be able to spot mistakes in the tally mans calculations
6. buyer needs to know how to see through the fuzziness of the rough cut to see and understand grain pattern. especially with cherry and other woods to be in clear finished cabinets
7. buyer needs to be able to load the truck in a way that cares for the wood and keeps dry and clean and straight
8. Now fair is fair and we should take our fair share of the scuds or at least look like we do, we will lose the respect of the vendor if we simply take all their choice boards so it needs to be done delicately. And the bins must be returned to a clean neatly stacked condition after we have rifled through them.

there are 8 reasons why buying the wood is so important, the obvious one is that the quality of the finished product depend greatly on the quality of the beginning product, it is the old adage garbage in garbage out.