With a love of timber in his veins and a good business head on his shoulders, David Smyth of Albion Timber has spent many years building up an impressive stock of British species not to mention a wide range of services for customers. As we discover, there’s still much in store...
Paolo Pisani takes a look at this wonderful natural wood surface property, which involves a shift in colour depending on lighting or observation direction
In this part of the directory, Peter Bishop gets stuck into the Ss, and there’s a lot of them. Here he catches up with 'saws' and spends quite a while covering all the associated stuff
Words & pictures by Ben Plewes
In this first instalment we're going to start at the beginning with a subject that is, surprisingly, often overlooked - the material we work with. At its most basic level the materials we use most of the time fall
into two categories. The first is naturally occurring timber which is divided into two further subcategories - hardwoods and softwoods. The second category is…
The moisture content of a piece of timber is something many of us take for granted. We buy timber from the wood yard and expect it to be fit for purpose. Timber is normally kiln dried down to about 8-10% moisture content but it will quickly reabsorb moisture if it’s stored badly. Does it matter? As the moisture content varies, wood expands and contracts, mainly across the grain. Using timber that has not been dried properly is a sure way…
Air Drying
Air drying is the traditional method of drying timber. Once the log has been sawn, the boards are stacked on battens or ‘stickers’ These should be made of softwood to prevent marking the boards. Stacks are built up which should be protected from rain and sunlight. If green wood is exposed to the elements the heart doesn’t dry and the outside keeps cycling from wet (when it rains) to dry (when the sun shines) this is one cause…
