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Need info on what type of wood to use ?

Started by macurtis, March 14, 2002, 05:13:19 PM

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macurtis

Stopped by a used equipment dealer today to drop off some
cards. I gave them to lady behind desk and explained to her
what I did. I was fixing to get in my truck when this man
came running out the door, the owner, I thought he did not
want me to leave the cards. He said he had been looking for
someone to furnish some boards for his equipment trailers.
He hauls everything from dozers to farm implements and
tractors. My question--What would be the best wood to put
on these trailers--all 2x . Wide or narrow? Be careful where
you drop off cards, you might get a saw job!

Bud Man

Macurtis --Try -Osage Orange, Cottonwood, Gum Heartwood, White Oak, Cull Hickory, Ash --Someone else will come along with some  more.
The groves were God's first temples.. " A Forest Hymn"  by.. William Cullen Bryant

Tom

The favorite down here for tracked vehicles is Live Oak (generally 3 inch) because it is so tough.  It is one of the white oaks.

For wheeled vehicles it is Treated Southern Yellow Pine.

Tom

Here is what Trc^ had to say on a duplicate thread.

The best from what ive seen would be steel plate  ... lol ..

Not sure about best but usually 2x8's are used .. some times 2x6's .. if have it and the customer will go for it I think a good hardwood like oak probably be real good

Trc^

macurtis

Tom----How much should I oversize the timbers?
He wants to let them dry before putting the on--
or could we put them on wet?

Thanks

Tom

If he is used to using dressed wood (boards go in channel iron) then cut the 2x minus the saw kerf.  you just use the inch scale and put it on  the inch.  It will dry close to a dressed size and can be dressed to size with a hatchet if you have too.  If it is a deck that doesn't fit inside of channel iron then it won't matter.  I would cut it a full 2 inch or inch and an eighth.  Shrinkage will depend a lot on the direction of the grain in the board so there is not a good answer.

If you make it out of white oak or any hardwood then you would be better off putting it down green. That stuff gets hard when dry.

Treated pine has to be dried to treat it and can be put down wet from the treatment plant if you aren't concerned with opening up cracks.  They don't hurt anything and let water and dirt fall through.  If you don't want cracks then the treated wood should be dried again.

Note: 3 inch or better is used for tracked vehicles because the tracks erode the wood not because they weigh any more.

Bibbyman

Make sure you have a source and a price for good long logs before you give him a quote on the price.  

Up here, most everyone wants white oak for decking.  And clear white oak logs 16'-20' long can be expensive and hard to come by.  You saw into one and hit a rotten spot in the middle and you've loss all profit or fallen into the red.

Then you got to figure not all the log will make nice, wide, full length boards so you'll have to find a buyer for them or eat them. :-X
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Sawing since '94

Frank_Pender

Out here in Oregon, Our Oak is so hard that  some of the guys would rather have Douglas Fir for the beaver tail ramps and decking as the grousers cannot grab hold enough to climb the tail of the trailer.  If the trailer is a full tilt they sure cannot get started on such a hard wood.  For the Low Boys most of my customers prefer the Oak as they are often getting on and off on the side as opposed to a steep incline.  some have the trailers that drop off the 5th wheel plate and unload forward and they too prefer the Oak. Most all of them install the material when it is green so as when it dries and get wet again and expands it does not buckel.  It merely expands to the point of when it was green.  The best of luck in you cutting ventures. ;)
Frank Pender

ARKANSAWYER

Macurtis,
  Sycamore works well and it tough to boot.  It and white oak will need to be sawed 8 3/8 inches wide to dry to 8 inches.  1 3/4 thick dries down enough to get into most trailers deck rails and is plenty strong.  Boards wider then 8 inches gets to cracking and warping to much. plus get  very heavy to handle.  Bugs like hickory and ash to well for it to last long unless coated with oil.  Q saw  the sycamore and they will not want to park a dozer on it.  Also figure your price for square feet of decking as it is easier for them to figure out what they need.  IE  My trailer deck is  8x22 ft or 176 sq ft and I sell trailer deck for $1.00 a sq ft so it would cost $176.00 for 2x8's to do it.  That is about 350 bdft of lumber that I get roughly $0.50 bdft for any way.
ARKANSAWYER
ARKANSAWYER

Jeff

Our Trailer beds on the flat beds and lowboys are all white oak.  If we have to replace them they are installed green because of the aforementioned reason by Frank. We also, and I doubt if this is very environmentally agreeable, use drain oil to thoroughly soak the lumber once it is installed. If it starts looking dry we soak it again.  

One of the reasons we do this would not be what you expect. Ice don't stick to it as well. After an ice storm you can get up there and just push it off, where with raw wood, it becomes part of the wood till it thaws.
Just call me the midget doctor.
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Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

Corley5

My uncle prefers big tooth aspen on his low boy.  It's soft enough to get some traction as Frank mentioned.  He puts it on dry then soaks it up with used oil so it lasts longer.  We've got a beech deck on our trailer that's been on it for 8 years and has held up good.
Burnt Gunpowder is the Smell Of Freedom

woodmills1

most of the trailer decking i cut is oak, some white, but most red, as that is the predominate tree around here.  i cut full 2 inch but will special to what ever a customer wants.  i get around a buck per bd ft as the logs usually don't come in under 50 cents.  i have cut hemlock for customers who want a little less weight, but watch out for splinters they are very painful and usually get infected. >:(
James Mills,Lovely wife,collect old tools,vacuuming fool,36 bdft/hr,oak paper cutter,ebonic yooper rapper nauga seller, Blue Ox? its not fast, 2 cat family, LT70,edger, 375 bd ft/hr, we like Bob,free heat,no oil 12 years,big splitter, baked stuffed lobster, still cuttin the logs dere IAM

L. Wakefield

   What do you notice on the oil-soaked boards in the rain as relates to traction? Does the rough cut compensate for the slick of the oil?   lw
L. Wakefield, owner and operator of the beastly truck Heretik, that refuses to stay between the lines when parking

L. Wakefield


Quotesnip

Shrinkage will depend a lot on the direction of the grain in the board so there is not a good answer.

snip

   Hey Tom, eddicate me on this one- I sense a larnin opportunity. I picture wood if it's ripped as mainly having the grain go vertically, in which case if I take your meaning correctly I might expect shrink mostly in the vertical direction. (Now of course, that I think about it I've seen mongo shrink in the crossways direction.) How does shrink relate to grain, then, and what variation can you see in the 'direction of the grain' of (I would assume) ripped boards (cuz if you are getting dimensional lumber by cross-cutting I don't know where your forest might be...trees 8-16 ft in diamater, and chainsaws with 8ft bars..Babe the bleu ox is out there somewhere  :) )?   lw
L. Wakefield, owner and operator of the beastly truck Heretik, that refuses to stay between the lines when parking

Tom

LW,

A sawyer has an opportunity to go after grain configurations if the log is large enough.  Some configurations work better for a special application than other configuratios.  Basically there are two.  Flat sawed= grain runs the width of the board  Quarter sawed or Vertical Grain= the grain runs vertical to the wide face of the board.  Bastard grain lies between the two.

Here is a commonly seen diagram of the shrinkage of designs as they are taken from different grain directions.  The grain has more to do with the shrinkage than the shape of the piece.



Longitudinal shrinkage(parallel to the grain) is quite small.
Reaction wood tends to shrink accessively parallel to the grain.
Wood from near the center of a tree (juvenile wood) shrinks accessively lengthwise.
Wood with cross grain exhibits encreased shrinkage along the longitudinal axis of the piece.



Wood is an anisotropic material with respect to shrinkage characteristics.  It shrinks most in the direction of the annual growth rings (tangentially), about one-half as much across the rings (radially), and only slightly along the grain (longitudinally).  The combined effects of radial and tangential shrinkage can distort the shape of wood pieces because of the difference in shrinkage and the curvature of annual rings.  

This is a paraphrased excerpt from the Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering material. (U. S. Gov. Printing office 1987)

Longitudinal drying defects as related to the grain:


** Tom's rule of thumb:
             " wood tends to bend toward the Bark".

L. Wakefield

   oboy. There are some synonyms in there that I'm going to have to hunt down. That 1987 handbook is clearly one of the fundamental texts I really want.

   I'd heard the term 'cross-grained S O B' (not complimentary..). From your nomenclature it sounds like there's another wood-based term that would do as appropriately.

   I see a little bit where your 'reaction wood' would fit into this. I appreciate the time you took to sketch this out. I should look to see if there's something like it in the 'online toolbox', cuz that wood be a good place for it too.  lw
L. Wakefield, owner and operator of the beastly truck Heretik, that refuses to stay between the lines when parking

Tom

I thought I had listed this link but maybe not.  Here is the wood handbook and more information than a young feller' can digest in a month of sundays :D

http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/FPLGTR/fplgtr113/fplgtr113.htm

macurtis

 :) Tom, I sure do appreciate the information.
Where else can you get info like this and put it in words
a new mill owner can understand, I say you can't!!!!!
Thanks

Don P

Sorry I got thinkin all chemikly :'( :D
Going all the way back to wood as long strands of polymer cellulose got me thinking about Tom's picture of crook.
To me that is a classic quartersawn board after drying. It's the left center board on the log end drawing, here's what happens.

The cell walls are made up of fibers of cellulose. As moisture(bound water, actually just H's and O's) leaves bonding sites on the cellulose chain the fibers of cellulose (red in my drawing) have room to move closer together. This is shrinkage. The angle of the microfibers of cellulose wrapped around the cell wall determines the direction the shrinkage will take.

Juvenile wood contains cells wrapped by fibers of cellulose at up to a 45% angle, a cell like this will shrink considerably lengthwise. A mature cell wall will contain microfibril angles closer to 5 degrees from vertical, it's shrinkage would be mostly in width.

Back to the crooked quartersawn board. If the right side is the heart containing juvenile cells that shrink lengthwise and the left side contains cells that don't, the board in drying will be pulled shorter on the heart side, or crooked.

In my drawing I tried to show that the MFA doesn't pick a certain time to become vertical but slowly becomes more vertical over time. Another fact I tripped over on the way somewhere, heartwood is not all the same. The deposition of extractives is pretty erratic and low quality the first few years of heartwood production,then it levels off. The least durable heartwood is at the heart :-/.

Saw quartersawn a little thicker if your pushing the planing tolerance tight. The thickness of quartersawn is tangential in direction, its thickness is where most shrinkage occurs.

Don P

As long as I'm off in the textbooks again ::). After the reaction thread I was reading up on it and alot of the same forces are at play...Here's my book report :P :D

Reaction Wood
 
Reaction wood is formed when, for some reason, the main stem of the tree is not vertical. It is the wood formed by the tree in trying to right itself. In softwoods compression wood is formed on the underside of the leaning stem. In hardwoods tension wood is formed on the upper side. If the center of the stem is considered the point of rotation, compression wood is pushing up on the stem or tension wood is pulling the stem upright. Imagine pulling on a stem, the bottom, compression, side would become shorter as the upper, tension, side would lengthen. I find this analogy helps me understand other characteristics of this wood.
 
Compression Wood
 
The underside of most branchwood is compression wood, holding up the branch. Weeping or drooping branches would be an exception. Compression wood contains more lignin and less cellulose than normal mature wood. Lignin is what makes cells stiff, or strong as in a strong column. Individual compression wood cells, or tracheids, are typically shorter by almost a third, blunt or even folded on the ends, and rounder in section. It is normally about equal in strength to normal wood, although denser. Compression wood shrinks about ten times more lengthwise than normal wood, 1-2% vs 0.1-0.2%, this is its major drawback. Compression wood tracheid walls typically contain a primary later of somewhat random microfibrils followed by the fairly horizontal S-1 layer, this is relatively normal. The major ply of the cell wall, the S-2 layer, that controls most properties such as shrinkage, lays at a much flatter angle than normal. As bound water leaves the spaces between the microfibrils and they draw closer to one another this causes more lengthwise shrinkage than in cells having a more vertical microfiber angle.
 
Tension Wood
 
Tension wood is trying to right the stem from the upper side of the pith, by pulling on, or restraining, it. Tension wood is low in lignin, high in cellulose. Cellulose is the long, straight chained, glucose polymer in wood. This makes a cell that is strong but supple. This analogy can only be taken so far as in reality tension wood is weaker than normal wood, so should not be used in critical structural applications. In cross section tension wood cells walls are thicker than normal, often with the inner secondary cell walls detached from the primary layer. In the secondary layers is an abnormal, thick, gelatinous layer. The fibers in this layer are arranged nearly vertically. Again the analogy of the cable being pulled taught with fibers straightened out or pushed to a flatter angle as in compression wood. Often this gelatinous, or G, layer us pulled loose out of the "shell" of the primary cell wall and dangles there as a tough fibrous "fuzz" that heats saw blades and makes a flat smooth finish very hard to attain. Shrinkage is high in tension wood but for a different reason than in compression wood. Since the inner layers of the cell wall detach so frequently the orientation of the primary layers' microfibrils determines the direction shrinkage will take. This is typically a more horizontal angle than that in the secondary lamellae of normal wood, so the longitudinal shrinkage in tension wood is greater than in normal, although normally about half that of compression wood.
 

L. Wakefield

   Gotta be, I'd think, that wood higher in cellulose would make a better bow. What does the steaming process do to the lignins and cellulose when it is used to aid in the bending of wood?

   Don, what are the textbooks to which you refer?   lw
L. Wakefield, owner and operator of the beastly truck Heretik, that refuses to stay between the lines when parking

Don P

Not just more cellulose but fibers lined up straight in line with the force of pull in the bow too...Neanderthals :D

This one is probably the first one I turn to when the Wood Handbook leaves off.
http://store.yahoo.com/isupress/0813822564.html

Its the text for the Wood Science course I posted before.
http://courses.ncsu.edu/WPS202/syllabus.html

I'm still wading through this part of "my eddication"...I think its about this time in school I found a high performance rear end ::)

Alot of times I'll go over to the Forest Products Labs site and hit their publications search button and start a keyword search. The Wood Handbook is their pride and joy but they have a few thousand other publications on line for free.
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/

I have no clue what steam does...anybody?  Downy fabric softener is supposed to work too.

I was thinking about the picture of cup above. It doesn't really fit in with longitudinal shrinkage. It's caused more by the difference between radial and tangential shrinkage on a flatsawn board. It is one of the defects caused by drying too slow. If a board dries fast enough, it will form a hard shell (remember dry wood is twice as strong as green) that will hold it flat through drying. Doing that without checking the surface is a whole other problem ???.

If we were to be afforded the "opportunity" to go to longer rotations wouldn't sawlogs be larger and contain a lower percentage of juvenile wood? Instead of making low quality rings on a little stalk those same 15 years could be packing on some real wood. 8)

Tom

Don,

The problem with longer rotations is that our society generally doesn't look past its own generation.  The tree has to be force fed and harvested in 10 years so they can get another in the ground. That's one problem some of us have with Agricultural Tax assessors who claim that our trees aren't doing as good as they should so we must not be a viable agricultural business.  They don't understand that my trees are probably for someone else to harvest.

The info you gave on the vertical grain (quartered) boards doesn't match the experiences I see with quarter sawing.   Most (not all) of my quartersawn boards that have been taken from the side of the log with the pith being cut out ten to bend with the concave side being the bark side and the convex side being the pith side.  If I split a 1 x12 the ends separate farther than the middle.

The wood handbook says something to the effect of......greater shrinkage is associated with greater density.  Since mature wood is more dense perhaps it is doing the pulling.  Of course a lot of what I see is not related to drying but rather to stress/tension that is probably what is really causing the crook I see.

Don P

"Of course a lot of what I see is not related to drying but rather to stress/tension that is probably what is really causing the crook I see."
Tom, I agree, those cells haven't had but 2 seconds drying time at that point ;D
Give those cross fibered...'s a few weeks(below FSP) and you'll be suprised I'll bet. Trace one, on the sawshed mark it, then dry it and hold it back up.
The board I described could be better made by boxing a timber till the Q-sawn board was away from the juvenile part of the log.
I pulled my post once because of this, then rewrote it. I see the same thing at the saw, boards tend to "leave" the cant( I want to know the resons behind those stresses too), but when I go to work the dried lumber the observation holds true, drying is when the abnormal juvenile cells do their lengthwise shrinking.  Ripping  a dried board with heart in the middle will often pinch the skillsaw and many times the two pieces will pop apart at the end of the cut with a gap in between of both pieces concave to the middle. Juvenile wood is up to 40% reaction wood :o.

The releases at the saw are a whole other ball of interelated wax (I think) :D
 I have wondered whether cells can be likened to a coil spring when green (the MFA sure looks like one in juvie wood), if this would explain the reverse tension at the saw? I don't think a mature cell, even though denser, can come close to juvenile shrinkage longitudinally.

You had touched on another cause of crook in a previous post that came to mind while I was looking this up. This is from Drying Hardwood Lumber (I think its available online).

Crook or side bend is often a result of improper sawing patterns or crooked logs such that the rings, when viewed from the end of the piece of lumber, are off center edge to edge. Often the wood closer to the center of the tree shrinks more than does the wood closer to the bark: the off center rings indicate that one edge is shrinking more than the other.

Another good definition here..

Cup is a result of the difference in shrinking between the two faces of a piece of lumber. The bark side will always shrink more than the heart side: this difference is accentuated as the lumber is cut closer to the pith (smaller logs and lower grade lumber). In other words, cup is a natural tendency of flatsawn lumber.

I also tripped over the mention of not fertilizing juvenile growth in Forest Products and Wood Science, it went on to say that fertilizing after mature wood production had begun would not restart juvenile wood production. Also juvenile wood pulps easier...I had always wondered why plant for pulp, when I cull, edge and slab all kindsa wood, guess its not tender enough for fine stuff.

Tom

Sawing boards off-center, while being unavoidable at times is not a good practice.  It is an old rule to keep the grain and heart centered.  

A problem that a portable custom sawyer will experience is cutting a 1x12 from a pretty log trying to get the cant to 6 inches because the customer wants 1x6's.  The customer will say "split it"  and I say "but.....but........" and when I do there are two perfectly crowned 1x6's whose best use will be rocking chair rockers.

I have wished many a time that I had  two good 1x6's I could trade him for the 1x12 but I would have to be a stationary mill with a board inventory to do that. :-/

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