Working with S3S lumber to speed up production

[andy photenas]

Well along with this thread, how would one go about checking suppliers for this type of lumber? I do have one way to buy it, but im not sure of the price yet. I would like to shop around but I am not sure what to look up to find the kinds of places that sell this lumber? I live in NH if anyone knows any places to try?

[Jim Becker]

Are you friendly with any other cabinetmakers in your area? That's always one good source for information about quality suppliers.

[Kevin Jenness]

http://rexlumber.com/page/custom-millwork/blanking

​http://www.atlantichardwoods.com/hardwood.html

[Ron Selzer]

Being in any column is fine. Love your tools, love the shop, love seeing a board appear out of the planer from rough, dont have to quantify your time because this is your fun time, thats great. Do mostly bespoke/one-of work that pays for your time handling chips, thats great. Work with a lot of local/sawmill stuff and dont have access to surfacing, bummer. Are extremely fussy and unpleasable, thats your gig. But even off a simple straight planer, to not be able to get decent quality material into your shop 75% of the way to ready to go to work and leaving you enough room to color/grain sort, joint, and so on, is just kidding yourself.

Another shop sent me this link the other day http://www.yoderlumber.com/images/pd...rpricelist.pdf

Scroll down to the bottom. $0.08/bf for surfacing, $0.08/bf for SLR1E. Thats insane. Even with the $20 minimum you buy 200 board feet of material and bring boards to your shop, not all the chips and off falls, for that cheap. You cant surface and straight line 200 feet of lumber in a hobby shop for 4x that price.

Said it before, be great to have the capacity of a large shop where to bring in #1 or #2 common or dead rough and grade in-house/cull out juicy stuff, but small shop, if you crunching the numbers or looking at time/production your best bet is likely to buy the highest grade material your supplier has available, and get it as close as you can to your finished product while allowing enough material to do whatever you need to do.

I want to add that I highly recommend Yoder lumber, as being great to deal with, accurate on description.
I am a hobbyist only customers are wife and then family and they all want to see knots and other marks
I average 500 bdf a year from them, started out with quarter sawn white oak 14' s2s, then 4/4, 6/4 popular, then 4 & 5' common cherry hit skip planed, been very happy with all of it.
Just great people to deal with. They sell single boards from the show room to semi loads delivered

[Mark Bolton]

Well along with this thread, how would one go about checking suppliers for this type of lumber? I do have one way to buy it, but im not sure of the price yet. I would like to shop around but I am not sure what to look up to find the kinds of places that sell this lumber? I live in NH if anyone knows any places to try?

Didnt you say your CNC guy was buying material he doesnt joint and surface? Cant you look at or buy some of his inventory or tack on a bundle or two from his vendor dressed to whatever spec's you want? I would imagine he has a list of a half dozen suppliers and can tell you his pro's and con's for each.

Your best bet is to just start calling mills in the area even if they dont do drying and surfacing and ask them who they know in the region that does. May be a several call leap frog but you'll land on a good lilly pad eventually.