Red oak (and white oak) question

[Jerome Hanby]

Talked to a guy with a local sawmill this morning. Headed out to see him this weekend. He has a lot of red oak and some white oak in 4/4, 8/4, and 4x4 slabs/posts. He basically slices trees into slabs and air drys anything he thinks looks good. I'm headed towards building some mission style furniture: morris chairs, foot stools, settle, end and coffee tables. How critical to getting a good looking end product is using quartersawn lumber? I've read that red oak presents some finishing challenges, is it worth the effort of (if the price is comparable) should I stick with white oak?

I've got some outdoor benches to rebuild, so I could slice and dice these slabs to get all the quartersawn material I could and use the leftovers for those benches (just talking white oak here). I'm talking through my hat here, I don't have any clear idea how practical getting quartersawn material out of slabs would be.

Any help would be appreciated!

thanks

[Jim Andrew]

Your sawmill guy should be able to tell you what is quarter sawn and what is flat sawn. Flat is what most lumber is sawn so the grain shows. Quarter sawn oak shows its rays. Turn a board and look at the edge, one side is flat sawn and the edge is quarter sawn, or vice versa.

[David Kumm]

I would buy good quality rift sawn and or quartersawn dried down to 10% or less. Red or white is your call and both will look good if you use good stock. Plainsliced lumber will yield poorly so the cost savings isn't that great over buying what you want. Dave

[Scott T Smith]

I would buy good quality rift sawn and or quartersawn dried down to 10% or less. Red or white is your call and both will look good if you use good stock. Plainsliced lumber will yield poorly so the cost savings isn't that great over buying what you want. Dave

+1. Oak is one of the more difficult species to dry, and the thicker the lumber, the longer that it takes. I do not recommend that oak boards be purchased 9/4 and thicker for resawing purposes (unless you're resawing veneer), because of the potential delta in MC% between the center of the plank an the outside. There is too much potential for post-resawing warpage.

Other species - such as black walnut - are much more forgiving on resawing.

If you're goal is to obtain quarter and rift sawn material, then it's usually best to buy it that way already milled and dried. As to red versus white, I've seen some spectacular figure in both.

[Todd Burch]

I have restored several vehicles in my life. If you haven't restored a vehicle, it's a lot of d*** hard work. When I was finished each time, I had a FINE looking, yet TOTALLY undesirable car, because I started out with a "dud" of a car to start with.

So, what I'm saying is... if you can start with FINE lumber, your pieces, when done, will be MORE FINE than if you started with "dud" lumber. Therefore, go for the better lumber and don't spend your valuable time trying to hack out decent lumber from crud lumber.

IMO... +1 on the white oak.

Todd

[Steve Griffin]

White oak is far better for outdoor applications. That's why it was commonly used for boats, while red was not. Quarter sawn will seasonally shrink/expand roughly half as much as flat sawn, so it's a better choice if stability is a concern.Nice looking furniture can be made with both species of oak and both quartersawn and flat sawn. If you are unfamiliar these woods and cuts, it's worth getting some samples and playing with some finishes.

[Jerome Hanby]

Think I'm going to pick out a few choices of White Oak and use it for the bench (sitting type) rebuilds and some shop projects. If it turns out nice I can always go back for another load. There is a place just over the Georgia state line that looks like they have some good prices on QSWO, I may just wait until I'm ready to kick off my furniture builds and make a road trip.

[David Keller NC]

Jerome - This is solely a matter of taste. Yours may vary from mine.

To my eye, furniture made with oak that shows face grain screams "cheap 'n crappy", particularly if it's been stained with a pigment stain instead of fumed or toned and has the really dark early wood stripes. Perhaps this is simply because very inexpensive "termite barf" furniture in Wally world and other inexpensive outlets frequently uses pigment-stained red or white plain-sawn oak as a model for the wood grain.

Furniture built from riftsawn oak, on the other hand, can be spectacular.

The above is one reason folks build with rift-sawn oak instead of quartered oak. With quartered oak, there will be 2 plain-sawn faces and 2 quartered faces. That means one has to carefully build the piece so that the visibility of the plain sawn faces are minimized. That's easy to do for a top, where one would see a very narrow strip of plain-sawn wood on the edges of the top. That's not so easy for the legs and other parts. And the plain-sawn face appearance was considered so undesirable in the heyday of mission-style furniture that Stickley developed a special construction for legs (a 4-piece "miter lock" design) so that all 4 faces would show quartered ray-fleck figure.

But - I think Scott will tell you that in many cases, the ray-fleck figure is actually stronger in wood sawn somewhere between 45 degree rift and true quarter-sawn. And the strong advantage to buying rift-sawn is that it's usually quite a bit cheaper and one doesn't have to pull one's hair out figuring out how to orient the pieces to avoid a lot of plain-sawn grain being highly visible.

[Peter J Lee]

I think the days of oak being the cheap alternative at Walmart and the like are largely past although I admit I haven't been in a Walmart for some time. Now, miscellaneous often mysterious species from Asia with a burgundy stain slapped on are what I see for cheap real wood furniture. I think cathedral grain can look great, although I'm the guy picking through the lumber at the big box to get the rift and quartered stuff.

I've seen a fair amount of Stickley stuff and read quite a bit as well, but I'm not an expert and can't speak authoritatively. My impression is that quartersawn was chosen for its stability as much as anything else. I've never read anything that suggested that any of the family thought plain sawn was ugly although I'd guess the drama of quartersawn was a big plus.

I've also seen a fair number of pieces by Gustav that had legs that were QS with veneer on the plain faces. I think that Louis and John were the brothers who used the miter lock legs. I don't know enough about Albert (I think that was a brother who manufactured furniture).

[scott vroom]

And the strong advantage to buying rift-sawn is that it's usually quite a bit cheaper and one doesn't have to pull one's hair out figuring out how to orient the pieces to avoid a lot of plain-sawn grain being highly visible.

In my neck of the woods there is no price difference between rift and qtr; price sheet will say "rift & quartered". You have to pick through the unit to separate rift from qtr'd.