(upbeat music) Marc: The wood for this
project is being supplied by Bell Forest Products in Michigan. Of course, I have local
resources here in Phoenix that I could have used, but on a small project like this, I figure this was a
perfect opportunity for me to test out the mail-order scenario. A lot of you don't necessarily live near really good sources for hardwoods, or you just have to pay extremely ridiculous prices for them, so I wanted to see what it was like to order something mail order, the process of unpackaging it, and show it to you so you
know what you're in for. Also, for me, I want to be able to know what this process is like so I can give a
wholehearted recommendation and speak from experience. I have two packages here. They just come in a nice cardboard wrap. The good thing is wood is very durable.
Not a whole lot can happen
to it during shipping. We've got some gorgeous
– wow, look at this – we've got some gorgeous
spalted maple here, which is what I wanted
to use for the doors, very inky, really distinct lines. Fungus does some amazing
things, doesn't it? We gotta nice piece of ebony here. I needed to make some plugs and things, just little decorative
elements for the cabinet, so this is gonna come in handy. Here's some eight quarter material, which is gonna come in handy for the legs. Package number two has
some more spalted maple. Look at that. Spalting is really amazing. (jazzy music) Marc: When I told them what
I needed for the project, I did request some wider boards so that I wouldn't necessarily have to cut or glue things up to get
the width that I need. Take a look at this. (laughs) Is that not awesome or what? Where's my tape measure? That is about 14 and 1/2 inches in width. That is freakin' awesome. I almost wanna save
that for something else because I don't need a
full 14 inches in width, (laughs) and I really
hate to cut that down if I don't have to.
Wow! Here is its twin, the second
piece of the same size. Unbelievable. I've got a lot of material here, and it's all come from a
place that's very different as far as humidity and
temperature is concerned, so I need to let this stuff acclimate to my shop's environment. I'm gonna show you how I do that. I start off by cutting a bunch of sticks. These are basically from
a piece of 3/4 inch ply. What we need to do is stack the material so that it has air on all sides.
I'm gonna start with one
of the bigger pieces. I really only need about two of these. I lay two of the stickers down, and I rest the piece on top of it. Two more, and here comes the next piece. A couple more – these
we can start stacking multiple pieces per. In fact, let's take this one down – like so. These aren't gonna be
too much of a factor. I'll just lay them on top. The idea here is we get plenty of air circulation through there. The weight of the wood itself helps keep everything flat. I'm gonna give this as
much time as possible to acclimate to my shop's environment, because it did come from a
totally different region.
One other thing that you can do to monitor the progress of the wood – first of all, you need to
know where is it at now? If you have a moisture meter, you can see maybe it's
already pretty close to my shop's environnment. To take a moisture reading, you can't necessarily just use the end of the board as
it is because the ends tend to be drier than the middle. I don't necessarily
wanna cut in the middle, so the best I can do at this point is just trim a little bit off of the edge with the miter saw and take a reading inside of the end grain. Let's run over there
and do that real quick. Moisture meters are
pretty interesting tools.
They typically have
either a digital or analog readout here on the front and two pins that you plunge into the wood, and it measures the moisture.
but how does it really work? Basically, an electrical
current is conducted across these two pins. What the meter does is it measures how much of that current makes it across. If there's moisture in the material, water is a great conductor of electricity, but dry wood is not. The drier the wood is,
it's able to detect that. Less current goes across the pins, and that means a lower
number on the scale. The more water is in there, the more conductivity there is and you get more of a higher reading. Let's plunge into the test board.
I try to get it as much
in the center as possible. It's very hard wood so get it
in as far as you can there. I push the button to get the reading, and it looks like we're reading
at about 8%, which is good. That's really dry enough to work with. The question is, is it going to undergo more of a change
because it's in my shop and it's even drier than
average conditions in my shop. Here's a board that's
been sitting in the shop for well over a year. I cut a fresh end and let's
see how that one reads. Okay, that's pretty much what I thought. It doesn't even read on the scale, and the lowest the scale goes is 6%.
That's kinda what I expected. Whenever I measure wood here in my shop, if it's been here for any
substantial amount of time, the moisture level goes below what these meters can read
just because it's so dry here. Let's talk about the acclimation
period for this wood – minimally a couple of weeks, ideally a couple of months if you can. Really, the longer the better because the closer it is
to your shop's conditions, the more stable it's
gonna be as you build it. We always talk about getting the wood close to the shop's conditions. In some cases, the shop's conditions vary dramatically from the final conditions where that piece of
furniture is going to go. In reality, the best thing to do, if you had the option, would be to store the lumber in the place where the furniture is gonna go. I've seen a lot of
people who take raw wood like this and they store
it under their couch. They put it in their dining room, wherever the final piece
of furniture is gonna be, because that's really the best way to get the most stable furniture possible.
As a side note, I remember visiting a local luthier school
where they build guitars and all types of stringed instruments. They have a humidity- and
temperature-controlled room that every night, when
they're done working, the parts get put back into that roomm, so that it absolutely, every
day, remains predictable. Until the piece is
finally built and secure, they leave it in this
moisture-controlled room, which is really a cool concept. If we had that luxury, we would match the humidity and the
temperature to the region that the piece is going to go. Obviously, that's just not realistic.
Using that sort of thinking,
it's very dry here, and where this piece of
furniture is gonna end up is in northern California. In reality, the moisture
content of this wood is pretty close to ideal for
where it's gonna be going. I probably should not let
this stuff dry out completely just so that it can go
back to northern California and pull in more moisture. Really, what makes wood split and crack is not just existing for
a certain amount of time. It's expansion and contraction, and expansion and contraction, which eventually leads to problems. The more of that I can avoid, the better off we're gonna be. I think what i'm gonna do
is give it about a week, and then I'm gonna start working it. The idea is to work it quickly, get the joinery cut and
assembled on the same day, and then, hopefully, we can get this piece up to northern California
and in its final home, where it won't experience a dramatic shift in moisture content
inside the wood itself.
Our boards have had a
few weeks to acclimate, and the humidity here has
picked up quite a bit. It's pretty common for this
time of year in Arizona, so there's really no better time than now for me to just jump right into this. The first thing that i need
to do is lay out my parts. I've got some big boards here and I have some choices
on where to place things. It's not really just a random thing. There's two ways we could handle this. We could just take this and
get the most efficient use out of the material as possible, and just build the project, or we could take it to the next level and think beyond that, think about the grain flow from the side to the top, to the other
side, to the bottom, the shelves, the doors. There's a lot to consider here. It's really important that we closely look at the grain and analyze where we want these boards to be cut up.
Let's take a closer look and
I'll show you what I mean. Obviously, the first thing we
want to do is avoid defects. If you see any defects in the surface, take those into account
and work around them. This is pretty defect-free. It's a pretty good board, but what I do have to be
concerned with is the grain. In this area here, the
grain is pretty straight. On this side you'll
notice the grain starts to take a little bit of a twist here. This is gonna be a little
bit harder to blend into the whole piece
bu this straight grain that goes all the way across – if this is our top and
then it runs directly – let's say this is the top.
This would be the right side panel. It's gonna flow incredibly well, especially because they're
from the same exact board. If we look at the next piece, we have another side and another bottom. The top and bottom are equivalent, but this is the bottom piece. The grain is relatively
straight all the way through. It's almost the same exact board, but here up at the top, things are a little more wavy. If we just take this straight
grain all the way across, it's really gonna give
us a nice continuous flow from the sides, to the top, to the sides, and the other bottom.
(mellow music).