hello everyone I'm Colin canet today is part three on how to save money buying wood and the topic today is buying direct from the mill now I can tell you I have no hope of giving you 40 years of experience in buying wood in a few eight-minute videos but what it will give you is a good grounding with this video and with the other ones so I hope you'll enjoy that now I know that not everybody's available for buying wood from a mill sometimes is too much for people but you know what you can do group buys too if you can get together with some other people maybe you can join together and make a quantity buy but like anything there's pros and cons to buying wood from a mill and the good parts are you're going to get a variety of cuts of wood you're gonna get rifts on flats on quarter-sawn you're also going to be purchasing wood at a cheaper price because you're getting it direct from the mill now the on the bad side on the cons there's a few things that you need to be aware first of all the woods going to be green because you're buying it from a mill so it's going to be at some state of wetness so it's going to have to be dried the woods going to have all sorts of cuts in and it's not likely going to have been sorted you're also going to need to halt at home you're going to need to store it somewhere you're going to need to monitor the drying because the woods going to be too wet to use right away and will almost always be RIF or through a rough cut so it's gonna need to be planed and jointed at some point and you need to be aware that not all mills are going to sell to the general public so you'll need to call them ahead of time and you know what if you show up at a mill and you're looking for one or two boards you're at the wrong place cuz they're really only looking for selling a quantity and giving a discount for that now the first thing they're gonna ask you when you call the mill or when you show up at a meal they're going to ask you how much wood are you looking for so you're going to need to know that answer you know your how many board feet or how many boards or you know a half truckload or a half vanload or something so you're going to need to give them an idea and that way they'll be able to help you pick out the best wood now there's three kinds of Mills large mills and usually a large meal we'll also have a kiln and for those of you who haven't seen a kiln this is what a kiln looks like at a large mill and there the mill itself is usually all enclosed so there's really not much to see medium sized Mills may sell to individuals but probably where you're going to end up at is a meal like this a small little mill that has a like a portable band saw and they likely will have some kind of a little inventory of wood as well it may have a decent inventory of wood and that's probably what you're going to be selecting from now whatever that wherever you end up whatever mill you end up with the the wood that you're going to be looking at is likely going to be what we call stacked and stickered and that means it's stacked horizontally it looks just like this and it's got stickers what we call stickers which are just little pieces of wood between all the boards and that's to let the air flow through to help the wood to dry out and they use the same method when they put the wood into the kilns now the wood that a meal will get when they buy a log or when they bring a log in there usually 25 to 40 percent moisture content so that's what they're cutting at as woodworkers we like to be closer to nine percent so you can see that there's an awful lot of water that needs to get rid of in that tree now if the mill has already cut and stacked and stickered the wood it will have dried to a certain amount so you may be getting it where it's already dried a little bit but as a rule um you will be getting you will be purchasing wood that's still 14 percent or more and when you get that wood home you'll have to determine whether you need to let it dry some more outside or whether you can actually bring it inside because we need to eventually in most cases we need to try and get that wood down around 9 percent for most woodworking and furniture making pride Jax now if you don't have a moisture meter now would be a great time to get one because you're going to need one if you're gonna purchase any lumber from a mill because you're going to need to monitor the moisture content so I'm gonna take a moment now and go through some of the wood here that I purchased on my last visit to a mill now first of all what you will get in a mill that you typically won't get from a lumber store is some live at now this one's pretty rough here but it just gives you an example that you can get live-edge lumber direct from the mill more so than you can from the lumber store now when you buy lumber from the mill you're going to in most cases you're going to be getting rough lumber and you can see that this is rough and it's quite thick this is probably almost an inch thick there's a three-quarter inch board beside that so you can see you actually waste a fair bit of material there and sometimes I use that and I cut the strips for different things but the would you get might not be quite as thick so it's going to be rough sometimes when you get the wood as it's drawing it's going to warp that's the nature of wood the other thing is when you're purchasing would watch for it ask the mill if they an seal a most do not some do but when you end seal you can see that this one here there's no cracks in it if they don't end seal you will get cracks and you can see this one here is crack now that's this one is in sealed but you know what you this one's gonna crack anyway and the reason is because all of these look at all of these knots in this area this board had no hope of not cracking now if it was not if these were not an sealed there would likely be two or three or four cracks and sometimes they will bleed up the board so that makes almost in this case almost a board foot of unusable wood here and the same with this one you know it's probably three-quarters of a board so you don't want to be paying for that so you're going to have to watch for that so your board foot measurement is probably if the woods cracked or if it's not sealed your board measurement wants to start here and and carry on down the board you don't want to be paying for wood that's going to be cracking it's going to be useless so it's just something that you need to watch for it now this one cracked after and this one's not a bad crack because it's toward the center of the board so I could actually cut that and use to have two pieces of wood here so it's not a total loss but the other reason I wanted to show you this board is the other thing you want to be looking for is defects in boards and this one has got it's loaded with knot so this one is not really a good board if I looked at the actual square board footage of this board this area here is good and then there's like a little strip up there so this part down the middle here it's got knots that are already cracking and checking probably not good so all of that stuff reduces how many board feet and usually the the Sawyer at the mill is going to know that now look at a board like this that's a you know this is a good solid board for example and you'd probably pay and an now sometimes what they'll do is they'll they'll take a cross-section they'll say yeah there's a few of them that are split in the end a few that or not because we're giving you such a discount we're not going to worry about a few splits here and there we just do sort of a bulk purchase so there's all sorts of different ways of buying wood and and Sawyer's and and mill owners have different ways of doing it but you need to be aware before you walk through the gates of the kind of things that you might be looking at now the other thing to be aware of when you're know when you're picking wood now you're probably not going to be able to select wood according to the pattern so for example here I have some this is a flats on board here and this is a quarter sawn and a flats on and you can see that this was actually sort of the center of the tree right here and they've cut this piece out of it but in this that very end that's a quarter sawn born I couldn't find an actual quarter sawn board when they went through my stack but that's a quarter sawn board and this now becomes flats on and there's also this is this very end one here that's actually rifts on what we call rifts on but you're going to when you get a stack of wood you're going to get a little bit of everything in it but when you're going through that stack you can sort this yourself and when you find some quarter sawn wood you want to set that aside because that special wood and the reason it's special is it's more stable it it's there's less tendency of it to twist it it has the nicest grain it's the most stable and this kind of wood here this is what we like to use for tabletops and things like that very nice stable wood the rest of this we can use this and cut it and make it for all sorts of different elements of furniture but the quarter sawn is really the premium if you were in a lumber store and they had the wood separated you would be paying more for quarter sawn wood than you would for rifts on or flats on now the other thing to watch for when you're selecting wood or when you're picking the wood from your pile and looking looking at the wood you often don't get a real good chance to look at the wood until you're pulling it off that pile and and loading it in your vehicle but try and watch for wood that has a similar coloration and in a small mill they're usually cutting from one log at a time so you'll typically get wood that's in the same part of a pile that's all from the same tree and that's good because you don't want to get wild color variations because it's very hard to match that wood especially if you're making larger furniture projects now one of the questions I always ask when I go to the mill is do you have any shorts and shorts are wood that they cut that is shorter than usually the six or the eight foot that they normally have and if they have that sometimes they're willing to get rid of that a little bit less price because not everybody wants short wood like this and in my case it was perfect so just another little tip to watch for when you go to the mill well that concludes my video on buying lumber direct from the mill lots of little tips that you can do and there's an article on woodwork web that will give you even more detail and don't forget to stay tuned for the next segment you may even want to subscribe I'm called a cadet for woodwork web thanks for watching you
