Working With Reclaimed Wood

Wood does not just grow on trees, it also comes out of old warehouses, old buildings of any kind, old bridges. What I'm talking about is reclaimed wood. What this deal is is that, at some point a long time ago, something got built, today that something is gonna be torn down and instead of just taking a bulldozer to the building, somebody goes in there and painstakingly removes it a board at a time, makes it available so that we can buy it and reuse it. I really, really love working with this stuff. I've worked with a gazillion different species from exotic imported stuff to North American hardwoods, but of all of those materials I've touched in my life, reclaimed wood continues to be my favorite and see if I can convince you about this. First off, what are we talking about here? So again, reclaimed means we're repurposing the wood. We're taking something that was used for an original purpose and bringing it back into the marketplace today. One of the things I really like about this is the availability of species that maybe I have a hard time buying today. So for instance, laying here on the bench, starting on this side, I've got ponderosa pine, then over here toward the middle of the bench, Southern yellow pine, look at the size of that chunk of wood. Then at the far end, that's a post that's made out of Doug fir. So the Southern yellow pine and the Doug fir obviously structural posts of some kind in a building. The ponderosa pine over here, I can tell you was originally part of a Sears Roebuck warehouse. And this was used as shelving. When the warehouse was ready to come down, they took the shelving apart. And like I said, made it available to be resold. One of the things I really like about it are the shadow lines that show up here. Shadow lines, this is where some cleats were originally fastened here. You can see we've got nail holes in here. I like incorporating that into my project. So one thing to be aware of is that if we're gonna work around defects, it's possible you're gonna lose a lot of wood cutting that stuff out. I prefer to incorporate those. I don't consider them defects, I consider them character. I think it really adds a lot, kind of a instant antique to what we're working with. The other thing that I think is really cool are the growth rings on the age of this material. Now, this board, it's a one by 12 and it split on me, but we can still see what we're looking at here which is from the center of the board out to the edge, look at the annual rings and how tight they are. In today's pines, it's not uncommon to see six to eight growth rings in an inch of material. Here in five and a half inches or so of wood, there are 105 growth rings. Very, very tight rings makes very nice tight grain and the face of the material. The other thing that's amazing about those annual rings is that this building was built probably in the early 1900s. Let's call it 100 growth rings, so the math is easy for my little head. If it was built in 1900 and I've got 100 growth rings out to here, this tree was a baby in 1800. Now, realistically, this ponderosa pine tree when it was harvested, could have been anywhere from 24 to 36 inches in diameter. So there's a bunch of growth rings out here we're not seeing. So maybe at the time it was cut down, this tree was 150, 200 years old. Meaning that it was a baby in the 1700s. It's just so cool that I'm holding this piece of wood in my hands that was a sapling 200 years ago. What do we need to watch out for here? Well, one of the things I find with the reclaimed wood is that it does tend to be more brittle, hence my crack here, than similar woods that I might buy today. Sharp tools, take a little more care when you're cutting. It's not a big problem, you just gotta be aware of it so that you can work around that brittleness. The other thing is, what's on or in the material. So for instance, we can still see some paint leftover here on that big chunk of Doug fir. Is that lead-based paint? I don't know. My preference with that is I allow the supplier from whom I get this to deal with the material. In their shop, they've got all the stuff in place to make sure that they're dealing with it safely so that when I get it here, the paint is gone and I don't have to worry about it. I just brought this piece in so I could talk to you about the possibility of lead-based paint. What about fasteners? If you're gonna do a lot of work with reclaimed wood, you might wanna invest in a metal detector so that you can run the metal detector over this. Make sure that we're not gonna introduce any metal as we're machining these parts. Again, in my case, my preference is to allow the supplier to do that work for me so that when I get it in the shop, I know that I'm not gonna run into anything I don't wanna cut on my planer or table saw, or any of my other cutting tools. What you need to do if you're interested in pursuing this like I have been is, use the Internet or yellow pages and look for reclaimed wood suppliers. That's the category. Once you find them, give them a call, find out what they have. Depending on where you live in the country, there'll be different species available to you than are available to me. Another consideration here is that, from my supplier, I'm able to get three quarter By 11. There's a lot of dimensional lumber that's available from them. Additionally, because they have large beams like this, you can custom order what you want. So for instance, from a huge beam, I've seen the supplier go to a band saw mill and cut out planks that are gonna become a tabletop. Lots of really interesting possibilities with this reclaimed wood. Another great benefit is that we're taking stuff that might've otherwise ended up in a compost pile and reusing it, recycling it, getting a lot more mileage out of this stuff. So, one, I just think it's cool because of its age. Two, I love the shadow lines and the character that this material can bring to us. Three, I love the recycling aspect of it. Check it out, find a supplier in your area that you can work with, dip your toe in the waters of reclaimed lumber. And I hope you're gonna like it just as much as I do.