Borg cedar for trellis?

[Dan Karachio]

I have promised my wife I would build her two trellis's, for our porch. Each will be about 8' high by 3' wide. We have a lumber yard with excellent cedar (clear heart and all), but it is really pricy. I mean we could get up to $300-$400 for this project. Lowes has a bunch of 3/4" cedar up to 16' in length and with a fair amount of digging you can find nice boards, but all have knots.

What do you think. In building a trellis out of thin pieces, would this be the way to go?

[Terry Beadle]

I think that if you can hand select the boards, even ones with knots, that you could make the treles's just fine. You can spend extra time for bad knot areas by cutting them out and then respline-ing them back together. By respline-ing I mean you cut the knot out and then cut the two pieces where they will join with a 3 to 4 inch long narrow angle cut. Then glue the two together. But with the stock being up to 16 foot, you probably don't have to worry about it.

Most treles's do not have to carry a lot of weight for a vine to grow on it so you should be ok for strengh at 3/4 inch wide. It's the thickness that is important. If they are only 1/4 inch thick or less, then you could have a problem. Depending on the design though you could use some core thicker pieces and use the thinner stock to join them.

I 'assume' you might be half lapping the cross supports and that should be ok as the glue will make the board joint area strong enough.

Don't forget to post your pictures of success !

[Dan Karachio]

Thanks Terry. I was planning to have 3/4 pieces (width and thickness) minimum, so that should be okay. I'm going to use the old dado blade quite a bit I expect in creating sort of half laps at every right angle connection. Thanks for the idea of splining too.