On Mar 29, 5:28*pm, whit3rd wrote:
On Mar 29, 1:38*pm, rwk wrote:

2 large pin oak trees came *down in my friends yard in northern NJ.
trunks straight for 30 ft and avg 28" in diameter. * can anyone tell
me if these trees produce an interesting usable lumber. * wondering if
it is worth having the trees milled.

Hard to say; the lower few feet won't be straight grained, which
leaves
50 feet, 28" diameter... call it 40 percent waste (the bark
part and the core don't make the best lumber), so it's 1300 board
feet?

Even if this species is 'inferior', it has quite a lot of value.
Milling to planks, drying, surfacing are all best left to the pros.
Bragging about the local wood you made into bookcases, stair
treads, kitchen cabinets... that, you can do yourself.

A friend of the family had some pin oak given to him as part of a
lumber buy (he used to peddle lumber on the side). I got some really
nice 12"w x 5/4 about 6' long pin oak for helping him unload one day.
The only way I could obviously tell the difference between pin oak and
read oak is that in pin oak that all the knots will almost always pop
out. No such thing as a "sound knot". This can cut the effective
yield appreciably depending on the project. Made a couple of simple
backless benches for the "kids" table in the coffee hour area for
church about 3-4 years ago out of this stuff. There were a few
perfect boards in the mix and I used two of those for the seats. Not
a hint of structural problems -- and some of the kids parents use
benches; this being in America means that the benches have had well
over 250 pounds dropped in the middle of a 5' span. The joinery on
this wasn't really fancy/intricate so I can't say much about the
expected problems with respect to humidity changes. The free stuff I
got was all flat sawn; I do remember looking at the edges and not
seeing anything which would lead me to expect quarter sawn would
exhibit significant figure/rays. IIRC it took stain about like red oak
(not like white oak) with an open grain structure. All in all
seemed a lot like red oak with nasty knots to me.
If I had access to a sawyer at reasonable cost and the wood was likely
to be free of metal nasties and I had a place to store the lumber, I'd
probably have it milled.

hex
-30-