SYP near Boston??

[Jason White]

Looking for southern yellow pine for a workbench top near Boston. The only SYP in the home centers is PT. Downes and Reader has 2x12's for $3.40 per BF, which sounds crazy expensive to me.

Any suggestions?

[John Lanciani]

Hi Jason,

I was looking myself and I finally gave up. For what dealers up here want for half decent SYP, you can get ash, yellow birch, or soft maple. I was lucky and scored a pile of hard maple from a fellow creeker (for less that $2 a bf :)), but I was all ready to buy ash from Higland Hardwood before I found the deal. I think the only reason that a certain author promotes SYP is cost, so if it isn't cheap, why bother.

[Carl Beckett]

I ended up going the rough sawn/air dried route. In fact, there is a guy in Rowley selling rough sawn, dried cherry for $3bf (look on CL). I did call him and he has quite a bit, but I am not sure the color/grade. So you could use Cherry for the same price!

For about $0.65 per board foot I got a guy just over the border in Maine that saws - I picked up some Beech. Not quite furniture grade, and you have to let it dry, but much cheaper than $3.40bf, and beech would be a great workbench material.

I havent had ANY luck with getting a good deal from a hardwood retailer - its all been top end pricing.

I think you could peruse CL and find some beech, ash, or soft maple that would be preferable.

[Don Jarvie]

Did you try Anderson and McQuid in Cambridge? I haven't been there in a few years but they have a good selection.

[Peter Quinn]

Here in New England we don't do SYP. Period. Its not here. Mr Schwartz of workbench book fame actually mentions this in his book, the complete lack of SYP as a New England regional phenomenon. So buy Ash, red oak, or what ever hardwood you can buy cheapest. I'd much rather work a load of MC ash than a pile of that nasty pitch pine any day in any event. Do yo really like working with SYP?

[Jason White]

I do love working with pine, though I've never tried SYP. Does it mill differently than eastern white pine?


Here in New England we don't do SYP. Period. Its not here. Mr Schwartz of workbench book fame actually mentions this in his book, the complete lack of SYP as a New England regional phenomenon. So buy Ash, red oak, or what ever hardwood you can buy cheapest. I'd much rather work a load of MC ash than a pile of that nasty pitch pine any day in any event. Do yo really like working with SYP?

[Peter Quinn]

IME it tends to have much more tension in it, and it's quite a Bit harder than eastern white pine. And the pitch sticks to every machine it touches, gums up saw blades, messes up planer feed rollers, yuck. They grow it at 100 MPH on tree farms and dry it too fast, so it's tense and gets case hardened. It's a sort of cheap commodity wood that gets expensive by the time it reaches us folks back east!

I don"t know why but it's not used much in New England for framing and getting a clear grade KD here is more money by far than most domestic hardwoods. I was quoted $5.25/bf for select kd 5/4? That's harsh for spy IMO.

[Neal Clayton]

the reason it was so popular in the old days, and the quality people assume when recreating old workbenches (specifically the longleaf species), is because it's a softwood that turns into a hardwood with age for all intents and purposes. can't beat the density of a hardwood with the weather resistance and length of a high sap softwood that is in forests as far as the eye can see, right?

the catch is, all those forests are mostly gone, and it takes those trees 300+ years to get to that age to produce that quality of lumber. the tree stops growing much in circumference and starts to grow heartwood around the 100-150 year range. it reaches maturity past 300 years.

as for the good stuff, it will generally stay pretty stable, be very hard, and other than the high sap content works pretty easily. water will wash the sap out eventually, too, which is why the sinker logs of this stuff are so valuable.

younger trees will have much more of the stresses and desire to warp/twist that peter describes. you'll see the rings from 100-200 year old trees starting to compress in on themselves and eliminate the sapwood a bit, but there's still alot of it until that 300-350 year stage of the tree's life, so you'll see alot of warp/twist and while the end result might look the same from choice boards, it won't be nearly as hard or resilient.

examples below...

the top is 'home depot' pine which we're all familiar with i'm sure, good for shims and jigs and not much else.

the middle door frame cut off is from a ~200 year old log i got from a local sawmill here that was salvaging trees from private land after the last bout of tornadoes. you can see the rings starting to beef up a bit and try to squeeze that sapwood out, but it's not there yet. appearance wise this is similar to the old growth stuff, but not nearly as hard or stable.

the third is a door casing cut off from salvaged beams out of new orleans. 325-400 year old trees produced those, the buildings they were removed from were mostly from the late 1700s/early 1800s. you can see the sapwood is all but gone, it's nothing but growth rings in very tight succession. this is the 'good stuff' that was cut by the first settlers in this country, but will carry a high pricetag.

so it depends. count the rings, is the short answer to the quality question. over 10 per inch is good, and is worth more than the dollar a foot people are used to paying for 'home depot' pine. under 10 is not very good, and will not wear very well or remain very stable. over 20 is very good, and if you're talking clear trim grade stuff in long lengths, probably worth 4-5 a foot. for workbench purposes if you can find high ring counts with tight unsplit knots that the higher end floor/trim shops don't want that would probably be best for a bench if you're set on using this species.

it's all pine, technically, although the home depot pine is a species modified to grow faster, but, there's yellow pine then there's yellow pine. price and quality will be reflected ;). the log the door frame came from i paid about a dollar a foot for, which i thought was a very fair price for a 200 year old tree. the beams the casing came from i paid over 4 dollars a foot for. considering the quality (clear 16 foot lengths and with that many rings per inch, harder than new red oak), also i think a fair price.

in short, there are lots of qualities and vintages of yellow pine. common stuff is really only worth a dollar a foot, and old growth boards are really worth 4 or 5. it's all relative.