Sources of Wood

[Oceaneer99]

Ray and I had a conversation last week about sources of wood.  He was recommending a building salvage reseller (Habitat for Humanity's retail store).  In the past, I have frequented a building salvage store (The ReStore), and decided to start a model using salvage wood.

I'm building a small space plane concept that was developed in the Soviet Union but never built. The fuselage is cut from a 1-inch thick piece of clear long-leaf pine (the hard stuff) that I bought at the ReStore.  The pine is gorgeous, very hard but seems to carve cleanly with sharp tools. The stock was 5/4 (lumber speak for 1-inch finished thickness) by about 2 inches and 6 feet long.  There are some holes drilled in it ever foot or so, but its otherwise unblemished.

I'm gluing up the delta-wing from some 1/4-inch plus thick unidentified hardwood (birch-like) from a shipping pallet.  I've been cleaning out my scrap wood, and this was in my "probably throw it out" stack.  It has some tricky grain in places, so I've had to be careful planing it.

The rudders are mounted on the wingtips, and I'll need to cut some piece of scrap down to 1/8-inch thick for those.  Maybe I can cheat a bit and call some of my basswood cutoffs "salvage".

As to other sources, some contractors doing remodeling in the neighborhood gave my son a wagonload of spruce cut-offs. I used one for the hull of my PT-9 boat model.

A lumber yard Free Bin near me once contained some nice clear cedar facia board.  It was rough on one side and primed, but I cut through to the wood and it made a nice fuselage (Yak-1000).

And don't forget to check random free piles in the neighborhood, in which I have found piles of 1-foot long clear cedar 1x2s and a pine board futon frame.  Like me, many woodworkers hate to throw out scrap, but are willing to give it away. I have a professional woodworker friend who advertises his free scrap on Freecycle.org (a recycling web site), and calls me if he has pieces good for models.

Garet

[Balsabasher]

Thats the spirit,free wood ! I keep my eyes open as well,we have a lady who has a junk shed near my workshop,I rummage through the broken up furniture and make her an offer for planks of timber,there is some well seasoned antique stuff sometimes,dont forget old cigar boxes,rich in material for fins and tailplanes,the old Havana boxes were beautifully made,snap them up.
I use up my pine offcuts from shelving support jobs on models,my Jelutong stock is dwindling fast,I used to sweep up the floor at the pattern shops and donate to the tea kitty for that,there is good wood around if you seek it out,skips as well are a rich source of material,happy hunting !
Barry/Balsabasher.

[R.F.Bennett]

I think we call skips, pallets....    I think... 

[Oceaneer99]

Of course, we are just plain messed up using the Queen's English on this side of the Pond.  Here, we use fork lifts (NOT skip loaders, which are like bulldozers here) to load pallets onto trucks.    And don't get us started on aircraft gear (but we all got our terminology mostly from the French anyway)!

[Will]

I think UK=skips would be US=dumpster?  Anyway, its the large metal bin that builders fill with their detritus and is then loaded onto a lorry (truck) to take away.  "Skip-raiding" should be popular over here now as what you take from the skip leaves more space for the builders rubbish - which they have to pay landfill tax on.  Anyway, I've just aquired a couple of mahogany (or possibly) sapele door frames from next-door's demolitions!

Regards
Will Booth UK

[dave_t]

Known as "dumpster diving" or in my neighborhood "alley shopping". A great source of wood.

[Oceaneer99]

Will, that makes more sense with the term "skip loader"; thank you for the clarification.  Yes, we call the big metal bins dumpsters.  Congratulations on your door frames.  Lou has done wonderful things with mahogany wall molding.

Dave, "Dumpster Diving" was practically a varsity sport when I was in school.  We especially liked to keep on eye on when they cleaned out the physics lecture demonstration store room.  My roommate challenged me to build one of those old-style home computers like the Altair using only dumpster parts.  I built a front panel made of quarter-inch black acrylic, with 16 toggles switches for address bits, 8 for data bits, some pushbuttons, lots of red LEDs.  But about that time, I was distracted by a neon light power supply that we found, and I started making boomerangs from scrap Lexan.

I hadn't heard "alley shopping", but did read one fellow refer to "urban beachcombing".

Speaking of which, there were two oak dowels sticking out of the rubbish bin at the Post Office this morning (?).

Garet

[lastvautour]

Yep, renovations do yield project wood. I acquired (free) some old pine clapboard used to cover houses before the vinyl revolution. It has straight grain and has a few knots, but will work great with smaller projects. My VooDoo Air-Toon has the flying surfaces built from my stock of clapboard.

Lou

[Oceaneer99]

More urban beachcombing:

It's been garage sale season in my neighborhood, and a lot of people are leaving piles of things that didn't sell next to the sidewalk with a "free" sign on it.  As a result, I picked up a stack of pine boards about 8 x 12 inches at one house.  Another had a box of wood scraps which turned out to contain substantial blocks of basswood, zebrawood, ash, walnut, and koa!

A discarded shipping crate supplied two nice large sheets of 3 mm 3-ply plywood, the same stuff I used for my smaller simple-scale profile models.

We also picked up a nice baby crib with new mattress and are bringing it to a charity for needy mothers.  And I found a copy of the book "Headhunting in the Solomons".

Last night, I sorted out my scrap hardwood bits (pieces under about 12 inches long) and found that some of my short pieces of downed tree trunk (birch, apple, and some other kind of fruit wood) are completely dried and ready to be resawn into sheets.

Garet

[Balsabasher]

Wow what a stash of wood you have there ! well done,we do not get any exotic woods as you have there,never heard of some of them but bet they make into great models.
Neighbourhood sales are virtually unheard of here in the UK but we have car boot sales instead,usually a farmers field at weekends where carloads of unwanted chattels are on display,I have picked up good tools from these sales and the odd model kit as well,even a Dornier Do.217 solid wartime kit with some really rough wood in it,also scrap metal is good to pick up for fittings on models,alloy offcuts for example,and then there are the aircraft books,in that department have found some real gems,you just have to keep looking and your eyes open.
Another good source of whitewood is those stores that sell Malaysian furniture,many of these shops sell off broken furniture at cheap prices.
Barry/Balsabasher

[R.F.Bennett]

Most cabinet and furniture manufacturers will let you pick through their cut-offs. They know the value of good wood and hate to see it tossed. Just take one of your models along with you when you ask and you'll have the whole shop looking at it. Just a quick assurance that your a non-profit modeler is often a big help too.   

[scottzepher]

I think we call skips, pallets....    I think... 

Hey Folks--long time, I know, family stuff.

Funny, in the time I've been skulking around SMM, I don't think we've ever really had a "recycled wood" thread.  With the exception of a fine piece of Basswood I bought at a lumber yard's grand opening (this is going back to 1992, BTW, and it was one yard by two-and-a-half inches, and I paid what I thought was additional extravagance for planing both sides), all of my material is either saved from the dumpster at work, deconstructed furniture, or part of a large scrap pile bestowed upon me by a very, very generous fellow woodworker. 
My warehouse club employers receive most of their inventory on pallets, wooden platforms roughly four to four-and-a-half feet square.  Most are collected over time and reused, the rest I wouldn't trust  all that much because I'm never sure if they've been treated or not. 
In the last two years, thanks to a very open-minded manager (who understands that the wood I carry away he doesn't have to pay to have carried away) I've been able to salvage wood from several rolling floral carts, a rather large skylight crate (made some excellent shelving), large appliance/furniture reinforcements, and just a few weeks ago a huge screen door display.  Before that I came across produce and other bulk merchandise arrive in cardboard containers with wooden reinforcements.  I've got enough to build shelving pieces and still have half a shop load to build models. 

[scottzepher]

Just a quick assurance that your a non-profit modeler is often a big help too.   

Would you believe that's why my first manager said no?  I sometimes felt it necessary to commit "civil disobedience."
Course it helped to have an "Assistant" Manager who had a shop.   

[scottzepher]

Known as "dumpster diving" or in my neighborhood "alley shopping". A great source of wood.

I always preferred "pack-ratting." 

[Oceaneer99]

Scottzephyr said:

My warehouse club employers receive most of their inventory on pallets, wooden platforms roughly four to four-and-a-half feet square.  Most are collected over time and reused, the rest I wouldn't trust  all that much because I'm never sure if they've been treated or not.

Scott has a good point about pallets.  I once picked up a whole bunch of pallet wood from a Vietnamese Buddhist Monastery.  The pallets were from Southeast Asia and made from a range of exotic tropical hardwoods.  But some work with some of the pieces revealed a great deal of powdery substance that I found out was likely pesticides, so I had to get rid of the whole lot.  The only piece I kept was part of a large plank that I'd already resawn so that a half inch of the original exterior was already gone.

Also, I thought of another source of wood.  On a trip to France, I went to a street fair and picked up pieces of a soft white wood from discarded cheese crates.  I carved a small flying helicopter model (the stick in a prop type) for a Dutch friend I stayed with later on the same trip.

Garet