I think they saw me coming!

[JPEC]

I bought a piece of American white oak from a local(ish) supplier yesterday, 8" x2" and 10ft long to make some window cills.
The piece cost me £61, this seemes pretty expensive to me, but I don't have a lot of experience with buying hardwood.
On the invoice the metre cubed price is £1485 plus the dreaded.
Am i paying over the odds? I don't know how to work out the price per foot cubed, but at a guess it's over £40
Any help appreciated

Julian

 

[Johnboy]

You bought 8/12 * 2/12 * 10 cubic feet which is 1.11, so you paid £54.95 per cubic foot which is expensive for sawn timber. There are 35.31 cubic feet in a cubic metre so there quoted price is 1485/35.31 which is £42.06 plus VAT so the price should have been £54.85. I would go back and ask to for them to explain how they got to £61. Somebody check my calcs please just in case I am completely wrong!!

John

 

[tibbs]

I don't know if the price is particularly good or bad, but you can do the conversion quite easily in Google. Just put into the Google search engine :-

1485 cu ft in cu m

and the answer 42.0505172 cu m will be the price per cu ft


If you can't quite get your head round that you can also do it the long way

1 cu m in cu ft = 35.3146667 cu feet
1485/35.3146667 = 42.0505172


Richard

 

[Scrit]

Forgive me but I make £1485/cubic metre = £42.03/cubic foot. I'd expect a yard to charge £30 to £35-ish for small quantity square edge 2in oak. But 8 x 2in x 10 feet is 1.11 cubic feet, so you should have been charged £46.65 + VAT = £54.82. How did they get £61, then?

And I did it on a calculator, same as I would in a timber yard (I ALWAYS double check their figures - call me suspicious):

£1485 / (39.375/12) * (39.375/12) * (39.375/12) = £42.03

(8 x 2 x 10 (feet) x 12) / (12 * 12 * 12) = 1.11 cubic feet

Scrit

 

[jasonB]

I come out with the same figures.

Could be that the £1485 price is for large orders and they charge a premium for small orders. The price per cube is about right though.

Jason

 

[Pecker]

They havent charged you a "wastage" charge have they? where for arguments sake they take a 6" wide board out of 8" board and charge you the diffence. I've just been stung BIG time by that.

mark

 

[Scrit]

Could be that the £1485 price is for large orders and they charge a premium for small orders.

That's a point - a fair few trade suppliers I deal with have minimum order values, minimum invoice surcharges, etc. For example if I deal with Timbmet in Rochdale their minimum order quantity is now 20 cubic feet on many items; go to Fletcher-Bolton 300 yards down the road (they are par of Timbmet) and they'll supply the same stuff at about 10 to 15% premium in any quantity I like. Only problem is it takes 3 to 4 working days to get the stock from the Timbmet yard to Fletcher-Bolton's yard, so they must be using very lathge snails to haul it

Scrit

 

[JPEC]

Thanks for the numbers everybody, very helpful.


How did they get £61, then?

According to the invoice the board is 0.035m3 which, working that with the £1485 comes out at the price I paid??
I guess their conversion from imperial to metric is tipped in their favour.
Using Tibbs' figures that comes out at 1.24 cu ft :shock:

The price I allowed for the wood more than covers the cost of it so it isn't really a problem I just don't like paying over the odds for materials and losing what could be profit or losing a job because I am charging too much for materials.

On the bright side it is the first 'real' bit of wood I have fed the new P/T and it didn't even flinch , the table saw wasn't so happy about ripping it in half though :?

Thanks for the advice

Julian

Ps. I tried ticking the boxes Scrit :lol:

 

[Scrit]

Ever been had?

 

[JPEC]

Ever been had?

Ha Ha :lol: No matter what I tried I just couldn't get a tick in that last box :lol:

Julian

 

[Johnboy]

I make it that you have been overcharged about 13%. I would give them a ring and ask how they got to the .035 cu m. I know it is not a lot of money but why just accept this? If they insist that they are right I would give trading standards a call, but then again I always was an awkward old git

John

 

[jasonB]

Worth double checking the size, is it nominally 8x2 as some hardwood tends to come out a bit thicker/wider, for example it could be

0.055x0.206x3.05 = 0.35m3

Jason

 

[Sean the amateur]

Anybody who regularly converts imperial measurements to metric or vice versa needs convert.exe.


Goto http://www.joshmadison.com/software and download it for free.

It is an excellent program.

Sean