Moisture content for a dining room table and chairs

[sailorjack]

Hi everyone,
1. i've been trying to obtain either Douglas Fir or Redwood Pine for my project. However, i have just been told by a timber merchant up here in Glasgow that their Kiln dried stock is about 14%. Is that adequate enough for a pine table and chairs? He went on to tell me to stay away from Redwood as there would be too much movement in it. Is that about right? What would be an acceptable moisture content for an internal table?
2. What a Palarva! (Is that how you spell it? :wink: ) Always loved saying that word, just never learnt how to spell it. ... Oh yeah, What a palarva trying to find Kiln dried stock up here in Scotland. If any fellow woodworkers from sunny Scotland would happen to know of any good Softwood stockists that would be great.

Cheers
Jack

 

[Philly]

Hi Jack
To your first question-I'd try and dry the timber a little more than that if your home is central heated. Bring it indoors for a few weeks to acclimatise before working on it.
Cheers
Philly

 

[RogerS]

Palaver

From your friendly English pedant :lol:

 

[Midnight]

Aye aye Jack..

it's a wee bit oot o your way.. but if push comes to shove, try this sawmill.. all his stock is air dried, then kilned down to 9%... I can vouch for the quality... dear... but worth it...

http://www.scottish-hardwoods.com/

 

[sailorjack]

Cheers Guys for the info (and Spelling :wink: )

Have any of you had experience working with Elm or Sycamore?

Midnight - Will phone Scottish Hardwoods later on as they sound ideal, thanks for the recommend, i will let them know you told me about them.

Regards
Jack

 

[Wanlock Dod]

Jack,

Not terribly helpful in your search for softwoods, and not desperately close to you either, but I've had some nice timber from Lanarkshire Hardwoods. Good and dry, even in sunny Scotland.

Cheers,

Dod

 

[Midnight]

Have any of you had experience working with Elm or Sycamore?

ummmmmm... that'd be me..??

project on the bench right now is a ripple sycamore table..

when it's done it's back to the oak n elm coffee / storage table...

then maybe...... just maybe... I'll get back to my sycamore tool chest...

 

[sailorjack]

:lol: :lol: So your busy then Midnight eh? Is Elm as bad to work with as everyone says? But i hear that Sycamore is beautiful to work with. Whats your view and in which ways is it better or worse?

Cheers
Jack

 

[Scrit]

Have any of you had experience working with Elm or Sycamore?

Elm is interesting stuff. Pretty unstable. I remember working in a house where the owners had decided to make their own staircase from elm felled in their own back garden (read 3 acre "coppice"). They wouldn't listen to the local joiner, who warned them about elm, and went ahead and made it anyway. Three years on when we were there putting in some oak panelling (by that time hubby had "done" his back and couldn't lift any more) the lady of the house complained to us that the staircase was forever creaking and groaning in the night. One of the old guys on the job told her that traditionally elm was only ever used for boat (barge) bottoms, lorry decks and coffins - because it will withstand being soaked for long periods and the dead uns don't seem to mind how much it creaks (or ho wet they get) :lol: Before Dutch Elm disease, elms were a very common sight in the UK but I can't ever recall seeing furniture made from it. Chestnut, oak, ash, sycamore, pine, etc yes - but not elm. So if you do use it make sure it's dry and that you take account of it's "wandering ways". Still I'm rather partial to a nice piece of burr elm veneer as an accent in a piece of furniture. Makes a pleasant change from walnut.

Sycamore is nice-ish stuff. Hard and fairly stable. Like beech it can scorch whey cross cutting or routing on end grain (not as bad with a spindle moulder IMHO), so watch out for that if you decide to use it - the cutters have to be really sharp and it works better using HSS that TCT. It also takes stains and dyes well if that's your fancy and will fume well. There are some nice "defects" to be found in the odd board, too - spalt, ripple, quilt, etc.

As for making your own pine furniture, you might be as well to try and find some alder, which is fairly knot-free and was certainly used by some of the better quality "pine" furniture manufacturers in the UK - before the business all went to China or Eastern Europe, that is.

For central hearing your timber needs to be down art 8 to 9 % RH.

Scrit

 

[Chris Knight]

Contradicting Scrit here. Elm is a traditional wood for chair seats (think Windsor type) as its cross grained nature prevents it splitting along the grain when tenons are jammed into it. It was also used for carts (IIRC the felloes) for a similar reason. Also, when we got furniture for our first house (Ercol brand furniture) the makers traditionally used elm for all their furniture.

 

[Philly]

Jack
I've used local air dried sycamore and elm. Both were a pleasure to work, the sycamore my favourite! The elm moved around a bit but once settled has been very happy.
Hope this helps
Philly

 

[Colin C]

waterhead37 is right about elm in chair seats ( Windsor types ), it can also be nice to work but some time will have a lot for crossed grain, so out with the scraper

 

[Scrit]

Hi Chris

I am not denying that Ercol, a firm started in the 1930s, uses elm. But I can think of no one else in the trade in the UK who have used it in any major quantities, such as Gomm for example. Ercol are well known for having developed a slew of technologically advanced processes for priocessing their timbers which are simply not available to the rest of the world, even their factory is a high tech marvel.

I do know that the Chinese traditionally used elm in furniture because of it's hardness and wide grain, but their timber furniture used wedged and tusked joints didn't it? So there'd be no glue lines to break. Is it perhaps that elm was too unstable to be glued with hide glues and that only the widespread introduction of UF and RF glues into the trade in the 1920s and 1930s made it possible to use the wood commercially for the first time? And has the subsequent widespread use of central heating finally given ius stable enough environments in which elm furniture is viable? Can you recall a single piece of furniture manufactured before Ercol which was solid elm? I've asked this question of people I know in the antiques trade in the past and nobody I've talked to to date has ever admitted to seeing solid elm furniture (i.e. cabinets), other than in veneers and chair components. Why is that? Is it just that they are looking for oak, chestnut and pine?

In a Windsor chair you have a mixture of timbers, for example many of the turned components are (were) beech. But they're not all elm. The base is elm because it is resistant to splitting, yes - another characteristic you want in certain parts of a cart or lorry or barge bottom. Is it just that what I was taught was out of date? Or is it that there was a basis in fact? I don't have my Hout Vademecum or Lincoln here so I can't look it up right now, but what I do remember in the few weeks we were in putting in that panelling was hearing the staircase creak during the course of the day as the sun moved round the house - which was incidentally not centrally heated! And no, I don't believe in ghosts.

I also find it interesting that people use beech for furniture these days, and even staircases. Another wood traditionally not used for those tasks due to instability.

Scrit

 

[Colin C]

I sohould have put alsdo that you where right about elm being un-sable at times, as I have seen how much elm seats can move over time.

There one more reason elm was not used a lot , Dutch elm dieseace.
It did mean there was not as much in this country as there was.

I have also had no problem gluing elm have hide glue at all and the chairs I took apart where done with hide glue too.
Elm on its now is not as strong as ash, with was used for chair legs ( windsors ) but the best ones where yew, from what I have seen it was later ones that had beech legs.
I ahve also found that it was central heating that maded elm harder to use as with the heat it moves a lot more IMO.

 

[Midnight]

Elm's queer stuff to work with.. in the same board you can get grain that's open, fairly soft and easily worked right next to a patch that's as hard as glass, grain going in every direction at once and damn near impervious to your tools... If you're gonna build with it, as Scrit points out, you need to bear in mind that this stuff makes a go-go dancer look positivly statuesque... (so I'm told anyway... Ahem)..

I tend to look for really straight grained boards to make frames with, keeping the highly figured stuff for panels, that way it can move around to its hears content without putting stress into the structural parts of the project...
I've used it successfully to build a table top, securing the top to the carcass with quite a few cleats to give it the latitude to expand across the grain. The attraction for me is that no 2 boards behave exactly the same; each has it's own individual figure and charactor... There's days when it'll roll over and behave itself, and days when you'll pull your hair out with frustration, but if you're prepared to put in the time to learn how to work it, it'll reward you with some really beautiful boards..

Sycamore is a different kettle of fish altogether... it's really fine grained, almost creamy in texture that responds well to tooling. Stability wise, provided you steer either side of the central pith of the log it shouldn't move around too much; the pith tends to see the worst of any shrinkage and subsequent cracking. It's a particularly dense wood to work (makes oak seem soft by comparrison), responds best to freshly sharpened blades, but doesn't punish them too much.
Provided you study the grain direction and work with it, it shouldn't present too many probs.. Biggest attraction to me is that it's available in really wide boards; biggest I've had wasn't that far off 3ft wide which opens up a bunch of design possibilities to take advantage of that... Like Elm, I tend to use it in frame and panel construction, giving it the freedom to move as it pleases...

 

[Chris Knight]

Scrit,
I have just looked at Lincoln - he lists uses as:-
Cabinet work, chairs and settee frames, Windsor chairs, turnery, bentwood backs, and domestic flooring. It is extensively used for coffin making, boat biulding, dock and harbour work, weatherboarding. Selected logs are sliced for decorative veneeers.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

There was always a bit of elm in wooden warships. Without digging around and checking my references I can't recall the exact uses-- I haven't really got time for reference checking at the moment. Elm isn't especially durable in situations where it's dry one minute and wet the next, such as on a boat.

However, the grain is twisted and interlocked meaning that it would withstand direct hits from opposition cannonballs and shells and the structure would remain basically intact.

The same hit on a piece of oak or other timbers would lead to a complete collapse.

Anyway, if anyone wants to do a bit of searching on the topic I think they'll be able to clarify the fractured snippets of information I've just dragged out of the darker recesses of my mind. Slainte.

 

[dedee]

Taken from the RHS - about 4th return on Google.

"Elm was sought after for shipbuilding because of its resistance to rotting in water. It was used to form the keel of HMS Victory and was favoured for casing the pumps, making capstans and constructing gun carriages to hold the cannon".

Andy

 

[Wanlock Dod]

Does anybody know if there is much of a difference between Wych Elm and English Elm? Is most of what has been said above equally applicable to both?

Cheers,

Dod

 

[Midnight]

found this link for wych elm...

http://www.british-trees.com/guide/wychelm.htm

tone of hits for english elm... none that I can find are forthcoming in info re the uses the wood's best put to.. this line amused me tho.. from a site about elms in Worcestershire...

Indeed it has largely abandoned sex as a means of reproduction

no tellin what goes on in deepest rural Englandshire..