A Beginner’s Guide to Hardwood and Sheet Stock
George VondriskaDescription
A common woodworking question is, “Where should I buy my material?” This is a great question. Home centers are not always the answer. Hardwood suppliers are often a better source for material for your woodworking projects.
The difference
Once you start shopping for and using hardwood suppliers instead of home centers for your project material, you’ll find a lot of differences between the two. Hardwood suppliers generally offer a lot of services, such as planing and straight line cutting, a broader array of material, higher quality products, and a much bigger variety of sheet goods. There’s a significant difference between hardwood suppliers and lumber yards.
Finding sources
There are a variety of approaches you can use to find a hardwood/sheet stock source in your area. As you talk to other woodworkers about sourcing these materials (including cabinet shops in your area), you should also explore the idea of combining orders. This means a handful of woodworkers splitting an order, which can help keep costs down.
What they’ll sell
Specific products carried by a hardwood supplier will vary from location to location. But you’ll most likely be amazed by the options you get. From melamine to Baltic Birch to cabinet grade plywood to furniture grade pine, there are SO many more possibilities than what home centers offer.
Grading
Hardwood suppliers will talk in terms of Select and Better, #1 Common, First and Seconds…Before your first purchase be sure you understand the ins and outs of lumber grading.
Learning about lumber
There’s a lot to know about the materials that go into your woodworking projects. You should understand characteristics of species, kiln drying vs air drying, types of sheet goods, and more. WoodWorkers Guild of America can help you. We have great information covering understanding wood and its characteristics.
My friend Sam asked me a great question the other day, which is, as he's starting in his woodworking, he's just getting his shop going, where does he go to get material? Cause myself and other woodworkers that I know, we use home centers for some stuff, but we don't use 'em for a lot of our mainstream plywood, and hardwood, and that kind of stuff that we're getting. And today it's kind of gotten for me where it's something I don't really think about a lot, cause I'm just automatically ordering my material, but it is great advice I wanna try to give to people who are just getting started. So here's the deal. Home centers do have some amount of material that you might be able to use for your woodworking projects. However, when we start to talk about especially hardwoods and softwoods that you wanna incorporate into furniture and cabinet-making products, we're really looking for a different type of material, a different quality of material. So one thing is if you go to a home center and you're buying red oak that's shrink wrapped in a piece of stretch film and it's a one-by-six, you're paying a lot of money per board foot for that board. Is it red oak, is it gonna work? Yes, but you're really gonna pay a lot of money for that. What you really wanna do as you get going with this hobby, is you wanna start looking for places that are hardwood suppliers. So I wanna differentiate this from lumber yards. It's not the same thing. Got some great lumber yards in this area. They sell two-by-fours, and two-by-sixes, and strand board, and you wanna build a deck, go to the lumber yard. You wanna build a cabinet, hardwood suppliers. So in the Yellow Pages, if there is still such a thing, or use Google, or call a local cabinet shop, tell them what you're looking for, ask them who their suppliers are. Now, there's some caveats to this. A hardwood supplier that's acclimated to selling to professional cabinet shops may not be set up to sell at the consumer level. What I mean by that is that if I call and order lumber, I might order 100 or 200 board feet at a time, go and get it, put it in my shop. You might want 10 board feet, 15 board feet, maybe you wanna try to pick the boards yourself. So when you call that seller, you've gotta ask 'em do they do retail sales, will they sell business to consumer, as opposed to business to business? Do they have quantity cut-offs? Now, a lot of the stuff can be worked around. So for instance, on the quantity thing, if they do have minimums, 100 or 200 board feet, a solution to that is to go in with other woodworking people, check out if there's a club in your area where you can get involved with other people looking for the same species, you can all roll your orders into one. And one, that's gonna save you some money, the more you buy, the cheaper it gets. Two, it'll get you past that minimum order thing. But I think it's really, really important as you look for better quality wood and as you look for better quality manmade materials, plywood, MDF, melamines, that you've gotta start to explore these other places that are supplying the cabinet shops in your area, and you're gonna end up with much better material coming in, which sure makes your woodworking a lot easier to do and your results a lot better. So again, check out local cabinet shops, ask 'em who they're using, look for hardwood suppliers, make some phone calls, nail this town, and that'll get you started on the road to bringing in better quality material for your woodworking projects.
I like wood working
There are also small local sawmills that produce hardwood boards but may have a smaller selection of species depending on what logs were available. Some will cut and kiln dry upon demand instead of having a selection to choose from.
some good tips
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Another thing to consider is that the hardwood supplier is NOT likely to be a big corporation. (At least, that has been my experiences!) That's right folks. You would be helping a locally owned business.