Black Walnut price at the Orange Big Box Store

[Clarence Martin]

WOW !!!

1. 1x6x8 piece of Black Walnut is 83.27!!!!!!

Is that the average price for Black Walnut now ????????????

[Malcolm McLeod]

That's about $20/bd-ft and is typical of hardwood prices at BORG stores, and I'd lay odds it was steamed.

I see it for $5-$6/bf at specialty suppliers. Highest recent price I've seen was $9.50-ish/bf for 'premium' BW. Premium was dictated because it was not steamed.

Shop around.

[Jim Becker]

No, that's not the price if you buy Walnut from a hardwood supplier, for sure...

Hearne has 4/4 black walnut FAS for $7.00 a board foot. Common is at $4.00.

[Peter Kelly]

HD stocks Black Walnut?

[Peter Quinn]

HD stocks Black Walnut?

That was my thought. What? That's around 15/bf on my calculator, calling it an 8" wide board which is about what it takes to get a clean walnut 1x6. Take a small amount for milling......that's working on triple the going rate around here from a hardwood supplier. Ouch.

[Bill Adamsen]

I've never seen it at Home Depot. But Black walnut air dries wonderfully, and is therefore pretty available at small sawmills from New England through eastern Kansas and south almost to the gulf. I recently bought a few hundred board feet of really beautiful material at my local supplier in New England and paid about $2/bf.

[Roy Harding]

I pay $4.75 for #1 common 4/4, $10.50 for FAS 4/4. I can get FAS 4/4 shorts for $5.25. (All quoted prices in Canadian dollars).

The ONLY time I ever buy hardwood from any "borg" store is if I'm pressed for time, and can pass the extra cost onto the customer.

[Bill Orbine]

You're not paying just for the walnut.............you are also paying for dimensioned lumber. DL runs up big bucks in the big box stores. Best to find a good lumber yard and buy rough or S2S.

[Bill Adamsen]

Dimensioned ... yes you pay for that. I should have mentioned that what I purchased was air-dried, rough-sawn.

[glenn bradley]

Black walnut is up to $8.25 on the west coast S2S. I'm told by one yard that it is being bought up by the container full sight unseen by off-shore interests but, I have found nothing in the news or periodicals that supports this so it is probably just sour grapes.

[Danny Hamsley]

Chinese importers have called me on several occasions wanting me to fill a container with walnut.

[Wes Ramsey]

That's about $20/bd-ft and is typical of hardwood prices at BORG stores, and I'd lay odds it was steamed.

I see it for $5-$6/bf at specialty suppliers. Highest recent price I've seen was $9.50-ish/bf for 'premium' BW. Premium was dictated because it was not steamed.

Shop around.

Noob question for Malcolm...what does steaming do for the wood and what is the process?

[Cody Colston]

I'm not Malcolm but Walnut is steamed to homogenize the color. The white sap wood is stained brown by the heart wood via the steaming process. That produces more saleable lumber but results in a muddied color that doesn't have the green and gold highlights of non-steamed Walnut.

The Box stores here only carry Pine, Red Oak and Poplar. It's priced as high as a cat's back, too. I can buy FAS Walnut for $5.60/bf and common for $4.50 here. I don't buy it, though, because I have a few hundred bf of mill-run Walnut that I sawed myself from trees that werre given to me. One of these days I may get around to separating it by grade.

[Malcolm McLeod]

What Cody said! They introduce steam into the kiln while drying (kind of counter-intuitive, but I think it is done early in kiln run time?).

What Cody calls "muddied", I call a grayish washed-out tone, and I usually stain or dye it to try to recover some of the depth of color, but its just not the same... Un-steamed has great depth, and colors vary from tan, to chocolate, to deep purple in the same board. I've never seen what I'd call "green", but I have no doubt at all that the wood is capable of producing it.

In typical FAS or common grades, I love the way Cherry cuts and feels under hand, but B.Walnut wins my vote for depth and grain texture. (All bets are off in the instrument grades...)

And a small gloat for my father: About 40 years ago, he bought the Black Walnut turning stock from a chair factory in N. central Arkansas that was going out of business. Average size is 2.5 x 2.5 x 48. It filled a 26' box truck and my brothers and I had to unload them. All 1400+! We've been cherry-picking it for projects ever since, and I'm still hauling about 2000 lbs of it around. Best he can recall he paid about 12 cents a stick for it.

[Jeffrey Martel]

$5 for #1 common 4/4 and $10ish for FAS 4/4 here in Seattle. I'm glad I got a decent stash off of CL, but I'm going to be running low again after the next project.

But yes, Home Depot now started carrying Walnut, Mahogany, Birch, and a few others. Typically 2-3x the cost of the hardwood dealers, though. And they seemed to have lost the Curly/Quilted maple that I used to find in their stacks. Compared to normal maple prices, it was way higher. But compared to curly/quilted prices, it was actually cheaper to buy through HD.

[John T Barker]

No, that's not the price if you buy Walnut from a hardwood supplier, for sure...

Hearne has 4/4 black walnut FAS for $7.00 a board foot. Common is at $4.00.

Hearne is the best.

[Michelle Rich]

Woodworker's source in arizona shows a price of about 13.00 bd ft. eeekkk!