jo4hn responds:

Jeez, $3.90 is awful. I just checked with a guy I try to go through to get
lumber. He pays around $2 a BF for both red and white oak, $1.50 for poplar
(and will be bringing me about 160 BF of poplar shortly [when it stops
raining
long enough for my shop door to be reachable by wheeled vehicles instead of
boats and tracked vehicles]; that poplar is about the prettiest I've ever
seen,
in widths from 10" to 16", flat as a--er, um--board, white, with maybe one
knot
per 14' length).

Grumble. The latest (on-line) price for s4s poplar at the blue borg is
about $3.75 a bf. And that is for 1x3x4' stock. You suck. I have put
off driving to a couple of local hardwood lumber yards (Peterman and
Reel) or "contractor yards" because I'm lazy, it is a bit of a slog and
the web sites are rather poor. When I can get rift sawn FAS white oak
from Hartzell shipped to the boondocks for a bit over $4 a bf, I'm
wondering whether I shouldn't use the oak for drawer sides and the like.
Oh and doug fir (select) is cheaper but not by that much ($2.66).
Enough whining I guess. Snuffle.

$3.75 for POPLAR! That wouldn't be popular poplar around here. It is the
dominant tree, and one local lumbering/sawmill operation no longer cuts it
because of the price. Can't make any money.

I like $1.50 much better. I don't know what the local borg branches charge any
more. They're 30 or more miles away, and the last time I looked, some rather
nothing red oak was going for what amounted to a bit over $8 a BF. I had just
unloaded a second pick-up (real pick-up, not the S10 I now have) load of green
red and white oak mixed...at half a buck a BF. Log run, but what the hell. I
can squeeze FAS out of enough of it to beat 8 bucks by a divisor of at least 4,
maybe 5.

Just got a bit of a line on what may be nothing more than a rumor, or that may
be gone by now: a stash of 50 year old black walnut, chunked up in someone's
barn. With my luck, the bugs have done away with it by now.

Anyway, the youngest daughter wants a bookshelf. I saw a few boards in that
poplar that have great white/green/black coloring, so I'm going to use a water
based poly finish to retain as much color as possible. I'm wonder if all the
green and black will go anyway. Tulip poplar has some wondrous greens, blacks
and purples when first cut, but usually loses the tints quickly. This stuff,
though, is kiln dried to either 6% or 8% already and has been stacked for a few
months. So it's worth a try. She doesn't like it, I can always stick it in the
office.

Charlie Self
"Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself
and a wreck of his country." Ambrose Bierce