"Mike at American Sycamore" wrote in message
Usually the cost of wood is very low in comparision to your time. I
have seen work that was done with shody material and took the worker
40 hours to make, if they had spent just a little more money on
material, the project would have been nice.

This is so true.

I'm working on making some boxes for gifts. American Woodworker has plans
for a simple box and lid that with a couple of fixtures can be turned out
easily. To set up the fixtures and get ready for a run of 6 or 8 of then I
figured I use some pine boards from the Borg. Resawed a board, planed and
set aside for an hour. Came back and found a nice "S" curve in the wood.
Not even good enough for test pieces. Meantime, I took a piece of elm
leftover from another project and in the same time have perfect pieces.