The grain is very straight and tight, giving cherry wood a uniform look and it mills very well. When stained and sealed , cherry produces one of the smoothest finishes available, giving it a very high-end look.
Best For: Due to its luxurious finishing qualities, cherry is popular for high-end furniture and cabinetry, as well as musical instruments, paneling, flooring, and carvings. A mahogany tree can grow very tall, reaching heights of more than feet. When it comes to hardwoods for luxurious finishes and projects, mahogany tends to stand on its own even over the gorgeous cherry wood.
The wood tends to be a rich red or brown-red. Mahogany has a very smooth, tight grain and is extremely strong and resilient. The trees reach heights of feet, but can have equally as vast canopies.
The hardwood that a rock maple produces is very dense and tough, with a wonderful lightly-colored appearance that varies between white, yellow, and a rich golden color. The grain is relatively tight and straight, and tends to show in light brown bands. There also is curly maple, which has interesting wavy grain patterns. Both grain types produce a smooth, fine texture that finishes very nicely.
Best For: Maple is a popular choice for flooring, veneers, paper, musical instruments, butcher blocks, workbenches, and baseball bats as well as other turned items. Oak trees, whether they are the red or white variant, are commonly found trees in the United States and produce two of the most popular hardwoods available.
Oak trees can grow up to 85 feet tall, and they drop floods of acorns every fall. Oak comes in two common varieties: white and red. Both are very dense and tough, with straight-grained, rough textures. Red oak has a redder hue, while white oak is lighter in color, ranging from white to a pale yellow.
It also takes stain very well, but will show grain through several coats of paint. Oak also is commonly used for flooring, furniture, cabinetry, and millwork. Poplar wood comes from a variety of poplar trees, some of which can reach towering heights of up to feet. These trees are widely spread across the eastern United States, and they produce a hardwood beloved by DIYers and amateur woodworkers for its utility.
Poplar is a lightly-colored hardwood, varying between a cream color and yellowish-brown. It also has streaks of gray or green, but they tend to darken over time. Poplar grain is straight and uniform, and as a softer hardwood, it takes very well to machining with hand or power tools. It does tend to leave fuzzy edges, however, so extremely fine grain sandpaper might be necessary for achieving a smooth finish.
When it comes to blending durability and good looks, teak is one of the top choices in the hardwood market. This wood comes from the teak tree, which is native to southern Asia but also grows on farms in Latin America, Africa, and other tropical regions.
Teak is a generally straight-grained wood with a coarse and uneven texture. The wood consists of natural oils, which cause it to be very rot- and insect-resistant. Despite those oils, teak is easy to work with, both gluing and finishing nicely. In many ways, teak and mahogany are very similar, but teak is unmistakably brown, while mahogany often has a red hue.
Another popular hardwood, walnut lumber, comes from the black walnut tree, which is common across the eastern United States.
To classify a wood as hard or soft depends on the seeds that the tree produces. A wood will be classified as a hardwood if the seeds that the tree produces have a coating. These coatings can either take the shape of a fruit or a shell. Hard wood is the wood that comes from flowering plants, also known as angiosperm.
These types of trees include walnut, maple, and oak trees. Softwood is the wooD that comes from gymnosperm trees, which have needles and produce cones.
They are also extensively used to manufacture furniture. Hardwoods are available in lengths from ft 1. Softwoods are used for wall studs, joists, planks, rafters, beams, stringers, posts, decking, sheathing, subflooring, and concrete forms. They are available in lengths from ft 1. Both hardwood and softwood lumber pieces are graded according to the number and size of defects in the wood. Defects include knots, holes, pitch pockets, splits, and missing pieces on the edges or corners, called wanes.
These defects primarily affect the appearance, but may also affect the strength of the piece. The higher grades are called select grades. Hardwoods may also be graded as firsts or seconds, which are even higher than select. These grades have very few defects and are used for trim, molding, and finish woodwork where appearance is important. The higher the grade, the fewer the number of defects.
The lower grades are called common grades and are used for general construction where the wood will be covered or where defects will not be objectionable. Common grades are designated in descending order of quality by a number such as 1 common, 2 common, and so on.
Pieces of softwood common grade lumber may also be designated by an equivalent name, such as select merchantable, construction, and so on. Lumber intended for uses other than construction, such as boxes or ladders, are given other grading designations. In the United States, most trees destined to be cut into lumber are grown in managed forests either owned by the lumber company or leased from the government.
After the trees have reached an appropriate size, they are cut down and transported to a lumber mill where they are cut into various sizes of lumber. There are very few pieces of perfect lumber. Even though great care is taken to avoid or minimize defects when sawing the wood to the required sizes, there are almost always some defects present.
The number and location of these defects determines the grade of the lumber, and the purchaser must choose the grade that is appropriate for each specific application. As the number of older trees available for logging diminishes, so does the lumber industry's ability to selectively cut pieces of lumber to the sizes needed for construction. Many of the trees being logged today are second-generation or third-generation trees that are younger and smaller in diameter than the original old-growth trees.
These younger trees also contain a higher percentage of juvenile wood, which is less dimensionally stable than older wood. To counter this trend, the lumber industry is literally taking trees apart and putting them back together again to manufacture the sizes, strengths, and stability required for construction.
Actually, they have been doing this for decades in the form of plywood and glue-laminated beams, and some of the new products use similar technology. One of the new manufactured lumber products is called parallel strand lumber.
It begins much like plywood with a thin veneer of wood being peeled off a log. The veneer passes under a fiber-optic scanner that spots defects and cuts them out, sort of like an automated cookie cutter. The veneer is then dried and cut into 0.
The strips are fed into one end of a machine, which coats them with a phenolic resin glue and stacks them side-to-side and end-to-end to form a solid 12 in by 17 in 30 cm by 43 cm beam of wood. The beam is zapped with , watts of microwave energy, which hardens the glue almost instantly. As the beam emerges from the other end of the machine, it is cut into 60 ft It is then further cut into various sizes of lumber, and sanded smooth.
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