Wood purchasing – Hull Humberside East Yorkshire

You are not alone in facing this challenge with finding wood and viewing it before purchase. I have not yet found a very good solution either in the UK near me (Reading), only compromises. I’m also interested in any good answers here.

In my experience, B&Q wood is good for almost nothing except learning how to foursquare it again. As annoying as that is, it can, ironically, be a good lesson to learn. I now credit any stock preparation skill I have jointly to Paul Sellers and B&Q – thanks for the extra practise B&Q!

B&Q’s Planed All Round (PAR) wood – often recommended for beginners as “easier to get started with” – is a bad joke. Anything over 5cm wide will be severely cupped to a level where to flatten it means loosing ~2/3rds of the thickness and it’s already expensive. Even if you are lucky enough to get the one square piece they have each year, you will still need to plane it anyway to smooth it as the machine planers rarely produce a good enough result.

The best bet with B&Q IMO is to go for rough sawn, kiln dried (or sometimes CLS if they have any in that looks good), because you will have to square, flatten and smooth it anyway like the PAR and it’s quite a bit cheaper and you lose less thickness from what you buy. The downside is that you will be limited mainly to miscellaneous “whitewood”. That’s OK though for beginners, provided you are happy to learn to prepare the stock and not just wanting to learn/practise joinery techniques.

Sometimes Wickes has better stock, but not by much.

I agree, many general timber merchants can be quite unwelcoming. Most are geared up for tradesmen buying standard list stock for building and not interested in someone who wants to have a look at what there is and get in the way of their forklifts loading up the white vans etc.

Google Paul’s blog post on sourcing wood. He recommends ebay and places like Scawton sawmill which take telephone orders and also internet orders now. Quality is supposed to be good, but unfortunately you may still not see what you get until it arrives and places like scawton will only ship orders of 5 – 10 board feet which may be WAY too much for some people to store/digest/afford at once, especially beginners just trying their hand.

Ebay could be good for getting random one-off hardwood boards and you get pictures at least, but you may be stung for postage as hardwood tends to be heavy!

There are some smaller specialist timber places, that will let you look and buy small quantities of hardwoods e.g. one board. In my case they are always annoyingly far away, but I do hope someone can advise you somewhere close to you!

Thanks for the recommendation Darren. I will have to try Oxford Recycling when I can. Everywhere seems to work out as a two hour round trip which makes popping in a bit difficult. I guess it would be ok if I was flexible about what I needed.

vwrmic – apologies for accidentally hijacking your thread.

Bump the original request for places near Hull, East Yorkshire

The old furniture thing is an interesting avenue. I would be interested to hear of success stories.
I think that it’s a win all round to reuse wood where practical.

The challenge I see with “recycling” old furniture is that the necessary steps to prepare it for it’s new life often involve making the the existing components shorter and thinner (often not insignificantly). The frustrating thing is that at the end of breaking down the old furniture and preparing the wood stock, you are left with the perfect components to make…. a smaller version of the thing you just destroyed. Oh the irony.

These challenges may be fun if you are creative and flexible with your requirements, or are mainly making small items.

In my experience, old furniture with nice wood e.g. oak, mahogany etc, isn’t free and the chances are it could be repaired or restored much more easily than breaking it down and making something new. It might also have been painstaking made by a fellow craftsman, so it might seem a bit of an act of vandalism to break it down for wood unless it’s badly damaged already or poorly made.

On the other hand, people are always getting rid of old pine furniture either for free or very cheap considering the amount of wood. Old pine tables would have some good thick sections and they are probably well seasoned and much better quality than the B&Q rubbish…

I totally agree with you MikeI. Unless it´s in very bad condition one should not destroy an old hand made furniture.
But, unfortunately sometimes you have to.
If such is the case, does anyone know how to remove any broken and rusted nail (no head) wich is just below the surface of the wood. The only way I managed to is to drill one or two holes very close and paralel to the nail and then force it upwards withsome adhoc pins. But this procedure seriously damages the wood… wich you´re trying to recover.
I´ll be gratefull for any sugestions.
Best regards from Argentina.
carlos

tks Darren.
I´ve got a lot of frames (something around 10) that I´ve recovered from the street!!! They´re some 120 to 140 years old, in perfect condition, some 5 by 5 inches, 3 meters long!! Wood is what we call locally Incienso since it´s got a very pleasant smell. Species are: Myrocarpus frondosus and Myroxylon peruiferum, undistinguishable when already cut from the tree. Nice dark red wood, hard and light.
regards

Indeed it feels odd to be in the “wrong place”. However, these places should know, where to get smaller quantities of wood, because they probably sell to these shops. Apart from that, you can simply tell them who exactly you are and they might actually help you.

My situation is similar, some big dealers nearby, diy shops have mostly spruce, which is even softer than pine, a very limited range of pine, even less ash and oak (max. 40 x 10 mm lengths).

I have collected quite a few pallets at work, mostly pine and something similar, but reddish and quite dense, perhaps fir. All pieces are short, and the size range even more limited than in our DIY shops, but it was for free. It is a bit of work to take the pallets apart and remove all nails, but a crow bar and a heavy hammer do most of the work for you.

There is actually one dealer nearby, that sells most types of wood that you are allowed to buy legally in Europe. However, it comes either in large planks that need to be resawn, or small blanks for turning and even smaller blanks for knife handles.

I suppose, we either live in wrong areas, or we have to wish a bit harder.

Good luck anyway!

Dieter

PS: I haven’t tried to recover wood from old furniture yet, but I will, if I get a chance. I see one problem: You won’t get, what you actually need right now, so you need some room for storeage.

Just found, Humber Wood Recycling. They might be of use.

http://www.humberwoodrecycling.org.uk/

Found it via this site: http://www.communitywoodrecycling.org.uk/stores/ which seems to have a list of all the UK ones at least. Might be useful for other reading this thread.