White oak haul

[Robert Hayward]

Picked up about 200bf of air dried white oak this morning. This is not your normal white oak you see up north. This is Florida grown Live Oak white oak air dried, hard and heavy. Live Oak is not a common lumber type of wood, at least around here it is not. Difficult to dry without cracking and it is very heavy to move around. The tree this wood came from was felled about six years ago on the property where I bought it. It was a huge tree judging by the stack of wood they had in their garage, guessing maybe 2000bf.

The small sample pictured has a couple coats of kusmi shellac on half of it. I was testing to see what it was going to look like. Most of the boards I selected were in the six to ten inch wide range. I also picked out six more that were over 18" wide, with one being almost 30". The wider boards have a lot of figuring from being near a crotch.

I have no idea what I am going to do with all this wood. I like working with Live Oak and the deal was too good to pass up. So I took a 75 mile each way road trip this morning.

[Andrew Hughes]

Nice haul I like live oak it’s very unique they way it looks. Despite have lots of trees in my area I don’t get to use very often. The trees never seem to blow over. And the wood is very difficult to dry.
My shop sits under the canopy of a live oak it’s about 70+ years old.

[Rob Luter]

Big White Oak fan here. I had an odd stick I made the box below out of. I wonder if it's the same Live Oak species? Sure looks similar.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51120717989_f336278edd_b.jpg

[Joe Cowan]

Isn't White Oak and Live Oak two different trees?

[Malcolm McLeod]

Isn't White Oak and Live Oak two different trees?

Very different - Quercus Viginiana (live) v. Q. Alba (white)

Live oaks are 'evergreen' in the south; holding green leaves all winter, only shedding them in the spring as new growth emerges to replace old. Extreme cold (north) reportedly can cause them to shed in fall, but I've never seen the result of these arctic conditions. But it did snow here. Once.

White oaks are rare in the south in my experience*. I tried a nursery purchase in N. TX, but didn't survive the summer. I've seen a couple of quality specimens in northern Arkansas, but not certain if they were native or nursery products? Can't speak for the Southeast USA.

[Frank Pratt]

Very nice haul. Do you mind telling us what you paid for it? I just paid $10.50/bf Cdn for some very nice clear quarter sawn white oak. Ouch!

[Jim Becker]

That's a very nice addition to your material collection, especially since you mention you love working with the oak. Congrats!

[Robert Hayward]

Isn't White Oak and Live Oak two different trees?

In this area Live Oak and many other varieties of Quercus are referred to as white oak for lumber purposes. Also there are many different types of Quercus that have live oak in their common name.
Here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Quercus_species) is a good listing of the various Quercus trees.

[Robert Hayward]

Very nice haul. Do you mind telling us what you paid for it?
$1bf, but I did have to get out of bed early on a Sunday morning and drive 75 miles each way. That should be worth at least $5bf, in my opinion anyway. :rolleyes:

[Jim Becker]

Jeepers...you "stole" it!!

[Roger Feeley]

I believe that the navy maintains a stand of live oak so they can keep up with maintenance on the USS Constitution. I wold assume that some trees are trained into unusual shapes for specialized parts. The location is a classified.

[Robert Hayward]

Jeepers...you "stole" it!!

I went there with 100bf as my goal, if the wood looked good enough. Had put that in the van and told myself the pile looked too tiny and said I would take another 100bf. Kept asking myself where are you going to put it when you get home as I was loading the 2nd 100bf? While loading I argued with myself a few times about asking for a price on the whole lot. Thankfully better judgement won and I drove off with only 200bf. Some 2000bf would have required getting rid of all the furniture in the living room and making that room a storage shed. I have a tiny shop already crammed full of machines and tools. The little barn out back is at capacity also.

For those that have not worked with Live Oak the wood is not for everyone. To get a final 3/4" board of any length the wood must be milled at least 1 1/4" thick green. Live Oak dries with a lot of undulations in the face of the boards. Not every piece, but a lot of them. It cracks a lot while drying also. I do mostly craft and hobby type woodworking requiring smaller pieces of wood so it is easy to work around the flaws.

My jointer has a 5hp motor with a Byrd head and cuts through Live Oak like nothing. My Dewalt DW735 planer with sharp knives complains about having to do Live Oak once the boards start getting over 5" wide or so. The picture of the finish sample posted above is 5 1/2" X 15". I had to take very thin cuts while planing to 3/4". Even then I could hear the motor slowing down a little. If I needed to do a bunch of the wood at one time I think the DW735 motor would overheat. Also the wood is so dense and smooth after the first pass the planer rollers have a hard time maintaining a grip.

Now what to do with all this wood. My kitchen is long overdue for new cabinets. Not sure how the Live Oak would look for cabinet fronts.

[Josh Molaver]

I believe that the navy maintains a stand of live oak so they can keep up with maintenance on the USS Constitution. I wold assume that some trees are trained into unusual shapes for specialized parts. The location is a classified.

Was curious so did some Googling! Fascinating!

https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own-private-forest.html

[Robert Hayward]

Big White Oak fan here. I had an odd stick I made the box below out of. I wonder if it's the same Live Oak species? Sure looks similar.
Nice looking box BTW. The wood does look similar but I think a different kind of Oak. Where did the tree grow?

[Robert Hayward]

Was curious so did some Googling! Fascinating!

That was an interesting read. The ship also had Live Oak in its hull.

An excerpt from an article:
When the ship was being built in the 18th century, live and white oak grew abundantly throughout the colonies and was easy to procur. The live oak used to build the Constitution came from the swamp coastal forests of Georgia.
The ship’s masts, cabinetry, millwork, and trim were originally made of Eastern white pine. This tree was also abundant in the colonies.

Here (https://historyofmassachusetts.org/uss-constitution-construction/#:~:text=The%20live%20oak%20used%20to,also%20abund ant%20in%20the%20colonies.) is the entire article.

[Michael Fink]

My jointer/planer has paid for itself several times over because of deals like this. If you are patient and can deal with rough sawn, you can get some fantastic deals. A few years ago, I got about 800 BF of beautiful white oak for 600 bucks. A year before that, about 600BF of walnut for 500 bucks. And I see deals like this all the time; every time I go out, it's the same story. Homeowner cut down an old tree, someone talked them into bandsawing it, the stacked the lumber in the garage and realized that without a planer, jointer, and some way to straight line, the lumber is useless. Wife gets tired of seeing it, for sale on CL for 1/bf.

Works for me. The high end woodworking stores near me are reaching into the double digits for many types of wood S4S. Walnut, goodness, I've seen that at 20/bf before. Even the big box stores are around 10/bf for red oak. Shoot, poplar is getting up there.

The way I see it, if I buy 1000 bf of oak at 1/bf and spend the time to plane/joint it, I've saved 9000 dollars. Make the price of the equipment seem really cheap, and that before you figure the flexibility that being able to take rough stock down brings to your workflow.

[Ole Anderson]

The foundation of the Brooklyn bridge is largely White Oak. Interesting read by David McCullough, The Great Bridge.

[Mark Gibney]

Live oak looks so great, so appealing and interesting that I always imagine it being best suited to being a coffee table top or small desk or small dining table.

Whenever I see live oak the boards are short and have irregularities that would make it difficult to harvest rails and stiles for cabinet work, but you seem to have hit the jackpot with nice long wide boards! Congrats and I'd love to see what you do with it.