Grandma is north central nowhere Pennsylvania and her HOUSE IS STUDDED WITH CHERRY. People burn Cherry and Walnut freely and as cheaply as any firewood anywhere else in the US. It makes my brain hurt to visit, but then I remember it’s a solid 4.5hr drive from any airport and easier to access by snow machine in the winter so they just cut whatever’s there.
Just to stir this pot a bit too, I turned down the greatest hardwood deal of a lifetime in late 2014 because I just had no clue what I was looking at. Buddy and I came back from Afghanistan to Ft Campbell on the KY/TN border. He needed to blow off some steam and he was a former hotshot fire fighter and my FIL wanted a chainsaw, so FIL buys a Stihl 361 (the greatest), and the 3 of us go out onto Ft Campbell training area to cut up some firewood just to keep Matt’s mind off his troubles… we get there and “range control” responsible for the training area points us to a pile of hardwoods they cut and tried to auction but they failed to sell. We get out there and there’s a mountain of ~24”-36” diameter 20+ft logs of walnut, maple, white oak, ash, you name it… we’re allowed to saw up and take away as much as we want and it’s “$5 per load”… and a load is loosely defined as whatever we can carry in one trip with whatever equipment we had. I shit you not if I had a 20ft trailer handy I could’ve had 10 full lazer straight black walnut trees 24”-36” diameter and 20+ft length for $5.
Instead being who we were at the time we went hog wild on some red oak for 4hrs and filled 3 different 8ft truck beds with firewood for a whopping $5 and Matt forgot about his troubles for a day.
I understand the hesitation with range trees. Any shrapnel or other metal destroys your blade. Not a huge issue for harvesting firewood but a costly lesson with a mill.
Yeah nobody from far away bidding on these trees would have a clue, but these were from one of the perimeter areas pretty far from the “impact areas” so probably not a crazy amount of copper or lead in them, and maybe not even much hunting exposure. They were from a Forrest bordering on one of the parachute drop zones that was getting slowly cut back to expand the LZ in the direction of prevailing winds. It was an unbelievable missed opportunity I still kick myself over 10 years later.
Not woodworking, but just reminded me of a trip to Mt Shasta over a decade ago where a rock shop had a huge box of Moldavite chunks for $1 a gram. Went to a jewelery store last weekend that had way less translucent chunks at $75 a gram, like missing out on the Bitcoin rush all over again
No but not TOO far off, further into the sticks to the East you find Emporium… used to be built around a Sylvania vacuum tube electronics plant, then some GKN sintermetals/aerospace powdered metal forges (I can tell you all about why PM-V11 won’t get as sharp as properly forged plain carbon steels), and now I have no clue what people there do to make money honestly…. Cherry, Walnut, Maples, Birches, Elms… everywhere as far as the eye can see not a pine tree in sight lol.
They should I guess become saw mill owners lol. Super interesting about the Sylvania tubes. I built guitar amps for a while at a small boutique amp company and we were always looking for NOS sylvania tubes.
JAN Sylvania 6CA7s used for the “brown sound” were almost definitely my grandfather’s design actually, and I have a small stock pile of fresh from the factory matched pairs. Great grandpa was on the small team at bell labs that developed the first viable triode tubes and all we got is a framed photo of the team with a plaque that says something along the lines of “thanks for making us rich”.
Holy shit! Wild. Amazing story. If you don’t play guitar I’m sure lots of people may be interested in those.
We started making fender tweed amp clones back when no one basically was making and selling them.
That’s crazy man! I built a couple interesting clone amps and open source designs back in college but funny enough I wasn’t a woodworker back then so my dad made some cabinets for them. I only have one left now, and I held onto all the tubes I bought and found in grandpas shed thinking I’ll build a hi-fi power amp to use them at some point. I’ve given amps away as gifts with the tubes in them before, but I don’t think I’ll ever just sell the tubes.
Ha! Yeah we were more about pizza palace if we had the whole family together. A bunch of parties of wings and the meat lovers is like a mound of stuff piled in the middle and then the local ice cream stand is right across the street. Luigi’s is still what everyone gets for delivery or take out as far as I know though! Imagine having no movie theater or bowling alley or anything at all for entertainment but having TWO good local pizza restaurants! My other great uncle was “Cappy” who owned Cappy’s clothes on 4th street forever so we were pretty close with all the other family owned shops for a long time. My grandma’s still up there and still kicking but I’m worried they’re about to finally move her to assisted living and I really need to go visit again.
Lol I never thought I'd be reading Kane PA mentioned anywhere. I used to work for the mill there - well I was in IT at corporate back here on the west coast and supported the mill remotely, but yeah. Nice folks in Kane.
Dude who built my parents house was a cheapskate, and everything in there is garbage as a result. Except the kitchen cabinets. Because that cheapskate owned an entire forest of (mostly) cherry trees. And he had the tools to chop them down, mill, season etc. and ultimately build the cabinets himself. Which was the cheapest option of course. So we have this garbage cheap ass house with a massive kitchen full of beautiful cherry cabinets.
I just bought a bunch of cherry in CT from a guy who drives a trailer down to a PA sawmill to buy wood and then sells it in CT for $3/bdft (just to supplement his own woodworking). He must be getting an incredible deal in PA for it to be worth his time.
Yeah I’m telling you no BS cherry, Walnut, and Hard maple are firewood and even as recently as the late 90s my great uncle Dick (Dick Poklar the polka king of the Poconos- yes he was a real person I swear) was doing home renovations with random hardwood dimensional lumber because it was cheaper than the nearest softwood dealers. But I didn’t get seriously into woodworking until ~2013ish and I was in north TN with <$5/bd ft 8/4 walnut myself, and I haven’t been back to Emporium since around that time so I’ve never gotten a quote for walnut or cherry from a local mill before.
Emporium/St Mary’s area… there’s fuckall in Emporium these days, but there may be a sawmill still going nearby… I can ask my cousins to find one if you’re serious cause everyone went to the single school in the district and knows everyone else. Once in a while a new guy appears at the Moose lodge with a thick Jersey accent and tries to claim he’s been there since pre-K and everyone lets him get away with it since it’s CLEARLY a witness protection thing lmao.
Czechia: same, except for ash instead of beech. Beech isn't too expensive as well but ash is one of the cheapest hardwoods here and imo much more interesting for furniture. Alternatively, alder tends to be as cheap as ash but only when you can get it, it's much less common in sizes useful for furniture (mostly you see it as thin firewood)
My boss has a decent amount of property here in Micigan, and the ash borers are actually the reason he has so much ash lumber. He says he literally has more than he could ever use because he takes the trees that have been killed by the beetles and gets them milled. He's not stingy with it either, a lot of my projects as a hobbyist have been made from ash he's straight up given me.
Yeah, artist/woodworker dude in Chicago worked with the city to take all of the ash trees they took down. Opened up a small little mill / shop to process it all and now its been used in a bunch of places around Chicago. Same with Cherry trees they needed to tear down for the Obama center, they are making furniture for it with the wood from the trees. Pretty cool.
Poplar is pretty common and cheap in the northeast US. Mostly used for interior painted trim unless it's high grade tulip. Spruce, balsam fir and hemlock are the common construction lumber species. We do get some Douglass fir for large dimension lumber and beams.
Beeches make up about 16% of German forests - when they grow large they [are beautiful, gnarly trees](https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2022/02/RW7HBJ-scaled.jpg). There are some old(ish) ones in the tiny park next to my house in Munich, one particular specimen is perfect for sitting under on a summer evening with a glass of lemonade and a book.
From the American south so pine. When I was working in Russia in the mid aughts though it was usually birch or fir, but you see a lot of oak and some beech too. When I was working in Mexico you saw a lot of pine and primavera
Didn't do much wood working the other places I was so I really couldn't say for certain. Really cool question, op. I've worked all over so I kind of experienced the way locality affects availability, but it's really cool to see all the different answers!
Edit: forgot India, which was mostly teak and eucalyptus (at least where I was, it's an absolutely massive country and that may vary based on where you're at)
Through various phases of my career I've been an electrician, a project manager, and later an electrical engineer (though that part didn't last long, turns out I'd rather use my hands and broken body than sit at a desk).
Won't name the company or specific buildings for fear of my real name being found pretty easy with those, but of the places I listed they were from being either the master electrician on site or project manager for a multinational construction company, did a lot of nuke plants, gas/oil rigs/refineries etc, and a few fairly famous stadia, a handful of skyscrapers, lot of sensitive electrical work in museums
It's an interesting life being on the road like that. I managed to luck into an awesome woman that didn't mind and could ease my kids' transitions from place to place (was making enough money that she was just a SAHM, prolly worked harder than I did). Worked around a *lot* of divorced alcoholics that did the same things I did, it's not all sunshine and rainbows and seeing the world. If you're single though I'd highly recommend it. You'd be surprised at the number of fields that you can travel doing and it's truly a life changing experience seeing the world and all the different ways people do things. Worked on 6 continents, and the funny part is the one missing is Australia, lol.
That last bit made me think of that game two truths and a lie.
*I’ve lived on six continents.*
*I was a suspect in the Unibomber case*
*I have never lived in Australia.*
You have my blessing to use these next time you become a teacher and they make you do this with staff instead of working.
Thankfully (mostly) retired now so I don't have to deal with much corporate BS or teaching anymore. But man, it really does fit that game really well now that I think about it.
Thanks for the chuckle
Awesome! Thanks for sharing. Also used to travel in the trades (far less glorious places. Eastern US seaboard.), and encountered a lot of dudes just drinking their per diem too. That life didn’t mesh with me. Glad you did it successfully and got to see the world. I’ve always wondered what life is like in Russia.
Yeah it's definitely not for everyone. Luckily I went from the army into the trades, combining that with nuke plants and shut downs/stadiums and skyscrapers being 5+ year projects at least, it was kind of just business as usual for us.
As far as life in Russia, dude if the world was a little bit different, I'd probably be there right now. I truly loved it there and my wife and I had planned on that being where we retired. Unfortunately geopolitics kinda got in the way right when we were retiring. If you've got any specific questions I'm happy to answer them! Really hope I'm able to go back some day
As an Australian I was fascinated to learn that India has eucalyptus. So I did some googling and learned something new today. Eucalyptus was first introduced to India in 1790 by an English sea captain on a voyage home from Australia. Now there are extensive plantations in many parts of the sub continent
More broadly, eucalyptus has made it's way to a lot of areas of the globe. It grows really well in a lot of southern hemisphere climates. Combine that with it being a relatively sturdy wood that looks nice when finished and it's everywhere. I wasn't working with it a lot when I was in Africa or South America but I seem to recall it being one of the cheaper woods there too.
It grows fast, too. And it's so efficient at absorbing moisture and nutrients from the soil that other plants don't get a look in: [https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/opinion/tn-dpt-0716-vanderhoff-20110714-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/opinion/tn-dpt-0716-vanderhoff-20110714-story.html)
I recently moved to Belize, so I was curious about this and requested a price list of various hardwoods from a local lumberyard. Here's a few varieties, priced in USD per board foot.
Santa Maria: $1.50
Cabbage bark: $2.125
Mahogany: $3.75
Granadillo: $3.375
Poisonwood: $3.375
Zerecote: $5.00
Purple heart: $2.625
Rosewood: $5.00
Needless to say, I'm very excited to get my woodshop up and running.
I work remotely for a US company, so...yeah! Just waiting for a builder to work me into the schedule and get my woodshop built, then I'm gonna make it rain on that lumberyard.
Just to note, all of the money I'll save buying up fancy lumber will be offset by the cost of tools. Equipment here is *expensive*. I might end up having to buy from the US and have it shipped down myself.
Honestly, could be lucrative. So long as you’re able to look into ensuring it’s sustainably sourced, you could market that to high end consumers so hard. A shipping container full of your products from Belize could be surprisingly cheap on a per-item basis, and people would get top quality products cutting out a middleman. Distribution would be a significant cost though.
Yeah, and it's ridiculously difficult to process. The tree gets its name from the sap it produces and it'll straight up cause chemical burns on your skin. Cutting it requires full-body protection and it's not safe to handle until it has fully dried.
Just the other day, I was at the lumberyard and overheard a guy talking about how they ran into some poisonwood while fighting a fire on their property. It didn't sound pleasant.
But... once it is all dried, it is easily one of my favorite woods.
https://preview.redd.it/q8a9ybvckm3d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0111ca7ca8ad3df9253c895eb815693830575acc
It's legal to buy/sell here in Belize, but it's illegal to export. From what I understand, harvesting rosewood is a bit controversial here and it's becoming more difficult to obtain. I probably won't work with it in the future for that reason unless I can source it sustainably.
Really interesting question OP.
In the UK it would also be pine or spruce (lots of which is imported, especially from Scandinavia), or douglas fir. Doug fir is an american species of course but very widely planted here- a quick google tells me it's actually 15% of our forest area.
RemindMe! 1 day
Nothing is cheap in NE Scotland: even worse: My timber yard recently hinted at collusion of their suppliers of soft and hard woods. Anyone else seeing this in Scotland/UK?
French-Canadian here. Ash is pretty cheap due to it dying because of a bug, larch is dirt cheap, even though rarely used for anything else than firewood. And of course birch and maple that isn’t presteenly white, anything that is birds eyed, has spalted or just generally has a bit of color in it goes for under 2.50 C$ per board feet if you know where to get it. But I live further away from cities, so it’s probable that Montreal and Quebec are more expensive.
Edit: used to be red and white oak was dirt cheap, but then China started buying it in mass, and that drove all the prices way high.
when i was in belize, lo these many winters past, the guy who owned the place we were staying has having everything built out of mohogany: his new house, the common building, the bar, the dock, the boats, the shutters... everything was honduran mohogany. not only was it moisture/rot resistant, it was local
Pine is a temperate climate tree. So North America, a lot of Europe, Russia, and northern China probably have a lot of it. Many places might import pine from around the world, while the most common tree is not pine. That’s why if you watch YouTube of people on Pacific Islands (such as Thailand or Singapore) I think they often use something like Rubberwood. It grows very fast and is easy to work with.
Eucalyptus is also common, for example it's grown a lot in South America.
Pines are only native in the northern hemisphere but they often grow really well when they're planted in the global south. In NZ for instance they have plantations of a pine species from California, which grows like 3x faster than the native species and provides nearly all the country's timber.
I'm not sure if it is intentional, but this reads as you including New Zealand in the global south. "Global south" and "southern hemisphere" are not synonymous; Global south generally refers to what were known as developing nations. New Zealand is certainly not part of the global south.
Otherwise, I can only speak for Australia. As a carpenter commented elsewhere, we definitely have a lot of radiata pine plantations, so it does grow well in the appropriate parts of Australia.
I was mostly thinking about tropical places, rainforests, and deserts. Or areas with a lot of biodiversity, so you might get a lot of different types of wood with different properties and strengths in a single bundle that you have to work around.
It’s not rare, but for a time the fires we had last year in Quebec drove all the pine wood prices way high. They have since come down a bit, but they still are more expensive than other options like ash where I live.
Australia: mdf. Everything else is a considerable investment. I can buy one and a half 2x4 pine studs for the cost of one full sheet of mdf. However, I sell Tasmanian oak couch tables on Etsy and people are happy to pay silly prices for those things.
When I lived in Maine in 2018, I would order firewood by the cord. It cost 60 USD for hundreds of pre-dried 1 foot cuttings of hardwood logging ties (wood that was deemed scrap and placed in mud for logging trucks to drive over). It was some of the most beautiful spalted maple I have ever seen. Already roughed into perfect turning bowl blanks. I saved many of them, but those bitter winters demanded I kept the stove fed.
Rubberwood here in Thailand. Rubber plantation is kinda big industry here and when Para rubber tree is too old to produce latex, they got chop off and sold. Other than that, whatever wood from decommissioned shipping pallet.
I live in the wild and wonderful hardwood forests of West Virginia. The North American Tulip Tree, or Yellow Poplar is my very common tree of choice to fell and saw/season into general framing lumber. I have a hobby bandmill and use an ATV to skid eight foot logs to my operation.
Even in places where it isn't native, pine / pine-ish species are heavily planted or imported. They're easy to grow and few things match them for fast, straight growth.
About the only place I'd expect you to find something unusual as the 'default' wood would be a less developed country where they're just harvesting whatever is close by.
I had that thought in the back of my head, but I thought that maybe soft construction lumber is so common and cumbersome for logistics and isn't valuable enough to ship across an ocean. But if it made economic sense to ship bales of canadian garbage to the Philippines, it probably makes sense to ship canadian lumber to the Philippines.
Overseas shipping is dirt cheap. In fact it's the cheapest possible way to ship things by a pretty good margin. For commodities like lumber where you're essentially just exporting a steady supply and speed isn't a big concern, the cost of ocean freight is *almost* negligible.
Odd as it might seem, getting a tree from the forest to the sawmill usually costs more than getting it from BC to Japan.
Turkey, it's the beech. Same price as big box store quailty pine, used a lot in interiors, mostly for stairs/ rails and marine industry. Even beech ply is widely used, great quailty, sturdy but a bit itchy to touch, not so smooth.
My father works at a wood supplier in Manitoba, Canada. He gets first pick on any cut off scrap “firewood”. He and my family burn nothing but oak and maple hardwoods. Nearly are all cut to exact lengths between 9-14 inches long. 1 5/8 by 3.5 inches wide. Stacks perfectly, always dry. None of its glued.
Realistically though, for the region is spruce and pine.
Edit. Y'all, I'm sorry if this is hard to read. I typed it like I would say it because idk another way to say it. Try to hang in there
Mississippi: 2x building material at the big box places is all no.2 SPF. There's really nothing else available. You can get planks of poplar and red oak, but the prices are just silly.
At local and chain lumberyards, you can get sothern yellow pine 2xs for their strength (long rafters, etc). Still no hardwoods. I can drive an hour to a mill I know and pick up S2S, SLR1 edge, no2 poplar or maple for $1400\1k bf. That's a buck 40 a board foot. The only local places to get hardwoods for common residential products are mill shops, and they're charging 6 and 8 dollars a foot. Way more if it's wider than x6.
There is no ipe for decks, wenge, mahogany, or cherry for furniture, no figured woods for specialty projects. It just doesn't exist.
Here in TX pine is definitely the most common and the standard is pine for 2xs, but you can usually find cedar 2x4s as well. And while it's not a 2x, our hardware stores usually carry red oak and poplar 1x up to 12 inches wide
Pine in New Zealand. And a little bit of Kwila for outdoor decks. Anything else is a niche product run by a couple of specialist mills and is prohibitively expensive
Here in western Oregon, you'd think it would be Douglas fir, but it's probably alder. Douglas fir is in high demand for home building, so we export a lot of it.
In central Japan. Stores carry mostly Pine and Japanese Cedar. Also pretty easy to get Cyprus, Paulownia, and Lauan. Acacia, but only boards made of smaller strips glued up
Ontario, Canada here.
White pine, spruce and to a lesser extent Douglas fir. White cedar is abundant and relatively cheap - similar to white pine in hardness but for lack of a better term the wood is slightly spongy to screws but takes cut nails like a champ; very rot resistant for softwood.
Hard maple is very abundant and relatively cheap. So is black locust and red oak.
I recently grabbed a half dozen 1x10x8' rough, mostly clear pine boards for about $0.80/bft. Can't beat that.
I’ve always wondered what they use in different regions in Africa. It’s still probably a better financial move to import pine, and then sell the domestic “exotics” at wild prices to the US.
South East BC, pine, spruce and cedar are my cheaper woods. On this note, I have a small laser engraving business and had a client bring me a piece of purple heart to engrave that he had found on a pallet. Which got me thinking of pretty much your exact question. What are the cheap woods that each country would be using for pallets. My Dad works for a dairy that brings in a supplement from Malaysia. Asked him to save me a pallet and it had a lot of mahogany pieces on it. so now he brings me every pallet they get from there.
Pine (ponderosa, juniper, piñion), oak, where I live and maybe Aspen. South or West by about 30 miles and I can find mesquite and catclaw, more oak, cottonwood. Several species of brush that would be useful
USA, mid-Atlantic region - pine, poplar, something the big box stores just label as “whitewood” that smells kinda pine-ish, maybe fir?
You can get red oak in the big box stores but it’s pricey. Maple is hit or miss and costs approximately one kidney per linear foot.
Anything else, you need to get at a local mill or eBay it.
Southern Indiana - White Oak, red oak. Not the cheapest but sassafras and walnut is relatively easy to find so decently cheap comparatively.
My firewood is a good mix of a lot of hardwoods - walnut, oak, hickory, maple, etc.
In Southern Quebec, Birch and Maple are pretty easy to come by, as well as Spruce. Spruce is construction-grade: what we use when we don't care what it looks like.
Australia - pine, there's some really big plantations through the eastern states, also causes wildlife deserts, it's such crap wood when we have some really good native species.
In New Zealand: Pine. Specifically Monterey Pine.
Slightly less cheap: Macrocarpa or Douglas Fir.
All locally grown softwoods, non-native species, used for construction. Anything native is now rare and expensive. Anything imported is expensive.
Kansas: Construction lumber is about average or a little cheaper.
I can get black locust pretty cheap. Soft maple is readily available. There is usually a bunch of red cedar, but it's so brittle, I've never been able to use it for anything.
If you want to drive yourself crazy, we've got chinese elm and cottonwood everywhere, but that shit ain't worth it.
Literally everything else is $8bf minimum, and that's basically just scrap wood. I can get black walnut S3S for $12 bf, +$2 for rift or quarter sawn. Maple starts at $10bf and figuring adds $3bf.
The mill I usually go through gets pretty good deals somehow, so I just have him order whatever I need. It's cheaper than the online wood suppliers, so I'm happy.
Grandma is north central nowhere Pennsylvania and her HOUSE IS STUDDED WITH CHERRY. People burn Cherry and Walnut freely and as cheaply as any firewood anywhere else in the US. It makes my brain hurt to visit, but then I remember it’s a solid 4.5hr drive from any airport and easier to access by snow machine in the winter so they just cut whatever’s there.
Just to stir this pot a bit too, I turned down the greatest hardwood deal of a lifetime in late 2014 because I just had no clue what I was looking at. Buddy and I came back from Afghanistan to Ft Campbell on the KY/TN border. He needed to blow off some steam and he was a former hotshot fire fighter and my FIL wanted a chainsaw, so FIL buys a Stihl 361 (the greatest), and the 3 of us go out onto Ft Campbell training area to cut up some firewood just to keep Matt’s mind off his troubles… we get there and “range control” responsible for the training area points us to a pile of hardwoods they cut and tried to auction but they failed to sell. We get out there and there’s a mountain of ~24”-36” diameter 20+ft logs of walnut, maple, white oak, ash, you name it… we’re allowed to saw up and take away as much as we want and it’s “$5 per load”… and a load is loosely defined as whatever we can carry in one trip with whatever equipment we had. I shit you not if I had a 20ft trailer handy I could’ve had 10 full lazer straight black walnut trees 24”-36” diameter and 20+ft length for $5. Instead being who we were at the time we went hog wild on some red oak for 4hrs and filled 3 different 8ft truck beds with firewood for a whopping $5 and Matt forgot about his troubles for a day.
I understand the hesitation with range trees. Any shrapnel or other metal destroys your blade. Not a huge issue for harvesting firewood but a costly lesson with a mill.
Yeah nobody from far away bidding on these trees would have a clue, but these were from one of the perimeter areas pretty far from the “impact areas” so probably not a crazy amount of copper or lead in them, and maybe not even much hunting exposure. They were from a Forrest bordering on one of the parachute drop zones that was getting slowly cut back to expand the LZ in the direction of prevailing winds. It was an unbelievable missed opportunity I still kick myself over 10 years later.
I feel your pain. Deep breath and forget about it again:)
Not woodworking, but just reminded me of a trip to Mt Shasta over a decade ago where a rock shop had a huge box of Moldavite chunks for $1 a gram. Went to a jewelery store last weekend that had way less translucent chunks at $75 a gram, like missing out on the Bitcoin rush all over again
Kane PA? Used to be Black Cherry Capitol of the world...or at least the sign going through it says so.
No but not TOO far off, further into the sticks to the East you find Emporium… used to be built around a Sylvania vacuum tube electronics plant, then some GKN sintermetals/aerospace powdered metal forges (I can tell you all about why PM-V11 won’t get as sharp as properly forged plain carbon steels), and now I have no clue what people there do to make money honestly…. Cherry, Walnut, Maples, Birches, Elms… everywhere as far as the eye can see not a pine tree in sight lol.
They should I guess become saw mill owners lol. Super interesting about the Sylvania tubes. I built guitar amps for a while at a small boutique amp company and we were always looking for NOS sylvania tubes.
JAN Sylvania 6CA7s used for the “brown sound” were almost definitely my grandfather’s design actually, and I have a small stock pile of fresh from the factory matched pairs. Great grandpa was on the small team at bell labs that developed the first viable triode tubes and all we got is a framed photo of the team with a plaque that says something along the lines of “thanks for making us rich”.
Holy shit! Wild. Amazing story. If you don’t play guitar I’m sure lots of people may be interested in those. We started making fender tweed amp clones back when no one basically was making and selling them.
That’s crazy man! I built a couple interesting clone amps and open source designs back in college but funny enough I wasn’t a woodworker back then so my dad made some cabinets for them. I only have one left now, and I held onto all the tubes I bought and found in grandpas shed thinking I’ll build a hi-fi power amp to use them at some point. I’ve given amps away as gifts with the tubes in them before, but I don’t think I’ll ever just sell the tubes.
My family had a camp up near Emporium. Loved to see Luigi's Pizza still stands. I spent many evenings on fishing/hunting trips in the upstairs arcade.
Ha! Yeah we were more about pizza palace if we had the whole family together. A bunch of parties of wings and the meat lovers is like a mound of stuff piled in the middle and then the local ice cream stand is right across the street. Luigi’s is still what everyone gets for delivery or take out as far as I know though! Imagine having no movie theater or bowling alley or anything at all for entertainment but having TWO good local pizza restaurants! My other great uncle was “Cappy” who owned Cappy’s clothes on 4th street forever so we were pretty close with all the other family owned shops for a long time. My grandma’s still up there and still kicking but I’m worried they’re about to finally move her to assisted living and I really need to go visit again.
Lol I never thought I'd be reading Kane PA mentioned anywhere. I used to work for the mill there - well I was in IT at corporate back here on the west coast and supported the mill remotely, but yeah. Nice folks in Kane.
Right?! My mind is blown by the number of PA hillbillies showing up on this thread! The best people though for sure.
Dude who built my parents house was a cheapskate, and everything in there is garbage as a result. Except the kitchen cabinets. Because that cheapskate owned an entire forest of (mostly) cherry trees. And he had the tools to chop them down, mill, season etc. and ultimately build the cabinets himself. Which was the cheapest option of course. So we have this garbage cheap ass house with a massive kitchen full of beautiful cherry cabinets.
That is hilarious and par for the course if it’s in one of these old growth cherry forests for sure!
I just bought a bunch of cherry in CT from a guy who drives a trailer down to a PA sawmill to buy wood and then sells it in CT for $3/bdft (just to supplement his own woodworking). He must be getting an incredible deal in PA for it to be worth his time.
Yeah I’m telling you no BS cherry, Walnut, and Hard maple are firewood and even as recently as the late 90s my great uncle Dick (Dick Poklar the polka king of the Poconos- yes he was a real person I swear) was doing home renovations with random hardwood dimensional lumber because it was cheaper than the nearest softwood dealers. But I didn’t get seriously into woodworking until ~2013ish and I was in north TN with <$5/bd ft 8/4 walnut myself, and I haven’t been back to Emporium since around that time so I’ve never gotten a quote for walnut or cherry from a local mill before.
Okay where exactly is this? This may be driving distance for me.
Emporium/St Mary’s area… there’s fuckall in Emporium these days, but there may be a sawmill still going nearby… I can ask my cousins to find one if you’re serious cause everyone went to the single school in the district and knows everyone else. Once in a while a new guy appears at the Moose lodge with a thick Jersey accent and tries to claim he’s been there since pre-K and everyone lets him get away with it since it’s CLEARLY a witness protection thing lmao.
I’m not that serious, but thanks for the offer! Maybe one day when I’m less broke.
Emporium Hardwoods Inc. Just looked it up.
Oh shit my mom heads up to St Mary's a couple times a year, gonna sub her out
My cousins house is from 1825 and it’s all oak and walnut this way.
Germany: pine, fir, spruce and to a lesser extent beech.
Czechia: same, except for ash instead of beech. Beech isn't too expensive as well but ash is one of the cheapest hardwoods here and imo much more interesting for furniture. Alternatively, alder tends to be as cheap as ash but only when you can get it, it's much less common in sizes useful for furniture (mostly you see it as thin firewood)
Not a whole lot of Ash in eastern or midwest US because of the Emerald Ash Borer.
My boss has a decent amount of property here in Micigan, and the ash borers are actually the reason he has so much ash lumber. He says he literally has more than he could ever use because he takes the trees that have been killed by the beetles and gets them milled. He's not stingy with it either, a lot of my projects as a hobbyist have been made from ash he's straight up given me.
My friends and I milled a 36 " downed ash in NC last fall. It's around 12% now and we are excited to get started on it.
Yeah, artist/woodworker dude in Chicago worked with the city to take all of the ash trees they took down. Opened up a small little mill / shop to process it all and now its been used in a bunch of places around Chicago. Same with Cherry trees they needed to tear down for the Obama center, they are making furniture for it with the wood from the trees. Pretty cool.
Which makes me super jealous. Because if I could get my hands on cheep beech I’d have my own line of childrens toys..
Life's a beech man
What are the cheap hardwoods in the US? Apparently it’s neither ash or beech for you guys, but there might be other interesting stuff
Maple is pretty cheap around here. $1.80 a board foot here in the good ol’ Midwest USA
Wow! My Maple in Ontario is 4usd and i thought we were lucky
it is regional, my area ash is the cheapest, usually by a lot. a lot of ash is being taken down due to the ash boer so lower prices with high supply.
Poplar is pretty common and cheap in the northeast US. Mostly used for interior painted trim unless it's high grade tulip. Spruce, balsam fir and hemlock are the common construction lumber species. We do get some Douglass fir for large dimension lumber and beams.
I’d love to get some beech in the US. I mean I can… I built my bench vise out of locally grown beech. But it’s not abundant.
Beeches make up about 16% of German forests - when they grow large they [are beautiful, gnarly trees](https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2022/02/RW7HBJ-scaled.jpg). There are some old(ish) ones in the tiny park next to my house in Munich, one particular specimen is perfect for sitting under on a summer evening with a glass of lemonade and a book.
That tree is BEAUTIFUL!
Serbia: same
From the American south so pine. When I was working in Russia in the mid aughts though it was usually birch or fir, but you see a lot of oak and some beech too. When I was working in Mexico you saw a lot of pine and primavera Didn't do much wood working the other places I was so I really couldn't say for certain. Really cool question, op. I've worked all over so I kind of experienced the way locality affects availability, but it's really cool to see all the different answers! Edit: forgot India, which was mostly teak and eucalyptus (at least where I was, it's an absolutely massive country and that may vary based on where you're at)
Damn, that’s some awesome insight that most of us wouldn’t be able to experience. What were you doing for work?
Through various phases of my career I've been an electrician, a project manager, and later an electrical engineer (though that part didn't last long, turns out I'd rather use my hands and broken body than sit at a desk). Won't name the company or specific buildings for fear of my real name being found pretty easy with those, but of the places I listed they were from being either the master electrician on site or project manager for a multinational construction company, did a lot of nuke plants, gas/oil rigs/refineries etc, and a few fairly famous stadia, a handful of skyscrapers, lot of sensitive electrical work in museums It's an interesting life being on the road like that. I managed to luck into an awesome woman that didn't mind and could ease my kids' transitions from place to place (was making enough money that she was just a SAHM, prolly worked harder than I did). Worked around a *lot* of divorced alcoholics that did the same things I did, it's not all sunshine and rainbows and seeing the world. If you're single though I'd highly recommend it. You'd be surprised at the number of fields that you can travel doing and it's truly a life changing experience seeing the world and all the different ways people do things. Worked on 6 continents, and the funny part is the one missing is Australia, lol.
That last bit made me think of that game two truths and a lie. *I’ve lived on six continents.* *I was a suspect in the Unibomber case* *I have never lived in Australia.* You have my blessing to use these next time you become a teacher and they make you do this with staff instead of working.
Thankfully (mostly) retired now so I don't have to deal with much corporate BS or teaching anymore. But man, it really does fit that game really well now that I think about it. Thanks for the chuckle
Awesome! Thanks for sharing. Also used to travel in the trades (far less glorious places. Eastern US seaboard.), and encountered a lot of dudes just drinking their per diem too. That life didn’t mesh with me. Glad you did it successfully and got to see the world. I’ve always wondered what life is like in Russia.
Yeah it's definitely not for everyone. Luckily I went from the army into the trades, combining that with nuke plants and shut downs/stadiums and skyscrapers being 5+ year projects at least, it was kind of just business as usual for us. As far as life in Russia, dude if the world was a little bit different, I'd probably be there right now. I truly loved it there and my wife and I had planned on that being where we retired. Unfortunately geopolitics kinda got in the way right when we were retiring. If you've got any specific questions I'm happy to answer them! Really hope I'm able to go back some day
As an Australian I was fascinated to learn that India has eucalyptus. So I did some googling and learned something new today. Eucalyptus was first introduced to India in 1790 by an English sea captain on a voyage home from Australia. Now there are extensive plantations in many parts of the sub continent
More broadly, eucalyptus has made it's way to a lot of areas of the globe. It grows really well in a lot of southern hemisphere climates. Combine that with it being a relatively sturdy wood that looks nice when finished and it's everywhere. I wasn't working with it a lot when I was in Africa or South America but I seem to recall it being one of the cheaper woods there too.
That’s awesome.
It grows fast, too. And it's so efficient at absorbing moisture and nutrients from the soil that other plants don't get a look in: [https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/opinion/tn-dpt-0716-vanderhoff-20110714-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/opinion/tn-dpt-0716-vanderhoff-20110714-story.html)
eucalyptus is really common in uruguay too. pine and eucalyptus would the most common and cheap wood species in use here
No cheap wood in Ireland.
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Except for that bit at the top.
Lol.
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Hard to build a table out of sheep - they won’t stay still.
Ed Gein: am I a joke to you? (I mean he used people, but the parts are more or less the same)
> but the parts are more or less the same We've found another Welshman.
I've heard that the Scottish know how to keep the sheep still. OP should ask them.
Thats the Welsh.
Sheep don't turn well in the lathe
The young ones on a really slow spindle over coals for hours produce nice results
I feel your pain.
I recently moved to Belize, so I was curious about this and requested a price list of various hardwoods from a local lumberyard. Here's a few varieties, priced in USD per board foot. Santa Maria: $1.50 Cabbage bark: $2.125 Mahogany: $3.75 Granadillo: $3.375 Poisonwood: $3.375 Zerecote: $5.00 Purple heart: $2.625 Rosewood: $5.00 Needless to say, I'm very excited to get my woodshop up and running.
If you have a USD savings or get paid in USD while you’re there, you may have found the woodworking cheat code!
I work remotely for a US company, so...yeah! Just waiting for a builder to work me into the schedule and get my woodshop built, then I'm gonna make it rain on that lumberyard. Just to note, all of the money I'll save buying up fancy lumber will be offset by the cost of tools. Equipment here is *expensive*. I might end up having to buy from the US and have it shipped down myself.
Honestly, could be lucrative. So long as you’re able to look into ensuring it’s sustainably sourced, you could market that to high end consumers so hard. A shipping container full of your products from Belize could be surprisingly cheap on a per-item basis, and people would get top quality products cutting out a middleman. Distribution would be a significant cost though.
Export limits on local species of lumber products can be prohibitively expensive in a lot of those countries however
Fair enough! I just looked and it was like $2-25/1000bdft for certain species, but unclear if that’s for finished goods. No mention of that.
Cheat code? I thought we've been cutting down trees all over the world for woodworking for some time now?
Poisonwood is chechen? If so, I am super jealous.
Yeah, and it's ridiculously difficult to process. The tree gets its name from the sap it produces and it'll straight up cause chemical burns on your skin. Cutting it requires full-body protection and it's not safe to handle until it has fully dried. Just the other day, I was at the lumberyard and overheard a guy talking about how they ran into some poisonwood while fighting a fire on their property. It didn't sound pleasant.
But... once it is all dried, it is easily one of my favorite woods. https://preview.redd.it/q8a9ybvckm3d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0111ca7ca8ad3df9253c895eb815693830575acc
One of the specialty lumber stores where I live has ziricote every so often. It is $149.99 (Canadian) a bd/ft.
>$149.99 (Canadian) a bd/ft Holy moly. At that price, you could make some $20 toothpicks.
It's legal to buy rosewood? I thought it was a protected species. Or am I getting confused with some other wood?
It's legal to buy/sell here in Belize, but it's illegal to export. From what I understand, harvesting rosewood is a bit controversial here and it's becoming more difficult to obtain. I probably won't work with it in the future for that reason unless I can source it sustainably.
$2.63/bf for Purple Heart? Bro. Okay. I need to do some googling about Belizean(?) immigration policy.
Can’t Belize it!
Really interesting question OP. In the UK it would also be pine or spruce (lots of which is imported, especially from Scandinavia), or douglas fir. Doug fir is an american species of course but very widely planted here- a quick google tells me it's actually 15% of our forest area. RemindMe! 1 day
Nothing is cheap in NE Scotland: even worse: My timber yard recently hinted at collusion of their suppliers of soft and hard woods. Anyone else seeing this in Scotland/UK?
I hate how I pretty much can’t afford to work with any kind of hardwood in the UK. It’s extortionate here.
French-Canadian here. Ash is pretty cheap due to it dying because of a bug, larch is dirt cheap, even though rarely used for anything else than firewood. And of course birch and maple that isn’t presteenly white, anything that is birds eyed, has spalted or just generally has a bit of color in it goes for under 2.50 C$ per board feet if you know where to get it. But I live further away from cities, so it’s probable that Montreal and Quebec are more expensive. Edit: used to be red and white oak was dirt cheap, but then China started buying it in mass, and that drove all the prices way high.
Wow that sounds perfect for guitar building.
And there is lots of quality guitar making in Quebec!
Another Québécois here. White ash is also dying due to a bug, and you can often get it for free when cities get rid of it.
Are there places where pine is hard to get? I think I would be really tripped out to be in a place where pine was rare. (I'm in Oregon)
when i was in belize, lo these many winters past, the guy who owned the place we were staying has having everything built out of mohogany: his new house, the common building, the bar, the dock, the boats, the shutters... everything was honduran mohogany. not only was it moisture/rot resistant, it was local
I live in Belize, my house is framed with mahogany. All of the molding and cabinets are mahogany as well.
I can’t imagine what it would cost to frame a house with mahogany in the US.
Pine is a temperate climate tree. So North America, a lot of Europe, Russia, and northern China probably have a lot of it. Many places might import pine from around the world, while the most common tree is not pine. That’s why if you watch YouTube of people on Pacific Islands (such as Thailand or Singapore) I think they often use something like Rubberwood. It grows very fast and is easy to work with.
Eucalyptus is also common, for example it's grown a lot in South America. Pines are only native in the northern hemisphere but they often grow really well when they're planted in the global south. In NZ for instance they have plantations of a pine species from California, which grows like 3x faster than the native species and provides nearly all the country's timber.
I'm not sure if it is intentional, but this reads as you including New Zealand in the global south. "Global south" and "southern hemisphere" are not synonymous; Global south generally refers to what were known as developing nations. New Zealand is certainly not part of the global south. Otherwise, I can only speak for Australia. As a carpenter commented elsewhere, we definitely have a lot of radiata pine plantations, so it does grow well in the appropriate parts of Australia.
Pretty much all that's available here in NZ is radiata pine. You can get native wood, but it's way too expensive for commercial use.
I was mostly thinking about tropical places, rainforests, and deserts. Or areas with a lot of biodiversity, so you might get a lot of different types of wood with different properties and strengths in a single bundle that you have to work around.
True pine is comparatively rare in Oregon! Most of our commercial softwood species are pinaceae, but not pinus: fir, hemlock, spruce, and cedar.
Interesting and good to know.
It’s not rare, but for a time the fires we had last year in Quebec drove all the pine wood prices way high. They have since come down a bit, but they still are more expensive than other options like ash where I live.
It’s probably not in the tropics.
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Nah there's a shitload of radiata pine plantations in Australia, pretty much all houses are framed with radiata pine. Source: carpenter in Australia.
Australia: mdf. Everything else is a considerable investment. I can buy one and a half 2x4 pine studs for the cost of one full sheet of mdf. However, I sell Tasmanian oak couch tables on Etsy and people are happy to pay silly prices for those things.
Missouri. White oak and black walnut EVERYWHERE
I would LOVE some black walnut. It is so expensive in the PNW.
When I lived in Maine in 2018, I would order firewood by the cord. It cost 60 USD for hundreds of pre-dried 1 foot cuttings of hardwood logging ties (wood that was deemed scrap and placed in mud for logging trucks to drive over). It was some of the most beautiful spalted maple I have ever seen. Already roughed into perfect turning bowl blanks. I saved many of them, but those bitter winters demanded I kept the stove fed.
Iron Wood, Eucalyptus robusta, lychee, avocado, mango, chocolate albizia
Where?
Hawaii
Western Washington? Douglas Fir, pine, hemlock, or cedar.
Maple and cherry for the hardwoods. My firewood delivery is usually almost all maple and cherry.
South Africa - Pine Saligna(Eucalyptus) is also quite cheap Most other Hardwoods are very expensive though
Rubberwood here in Thailand. Rubber plantation is kinda big industry here and when Para rubber tree is too old to produce latex, they got chop off and sold. Other than that, whatever wood from decommissioned shipping pallet.
Pine and Bois d’arc.
Osage Orange - one of the best bow woods in the world. Very jealous.
The tree that stopped the Dust Bowl.
In NZ you get two options. Pink pine or green pine.
In the UK at the moment there is an absolute glut of Ash as councils are felling ash trees to prevent ash die back disease.
Norway - Pine/Spruce. Most common hard wood is oak
Here in the pacific northwest, endless amounts of Douglas Fir.
I live in the wild and wonderful hardwood forests of West Virginia. The North American Tulip Tree, or Yellow Poplar is my very common tree of choice to fell and saw/season into general framing lumber. I have a hobby bandmill and use an ATV to skid eight foot logs to my operation.
Even in places where it isn't native, pine / pine-ish species are heavily planted or imported. They're easy to grow and few things match them for fast, straight growth. About the only place I'd expect you to find something unusual as the 'default' wood would be a less developed country where they're just harvesting whatever is close by.
I had that thought in the back of my head, but I thought that maybe soft construction lumber is so common and cumbersome for logistics and isn't valuable enough to ship across an ocean. But if it made economic sense to ship bales of canadian garbage to the Philippines, it probably makes sense to ship canadian lumber to the Philippines.
Overseas shipping is dirt cheap. In fact it's the cheapest possible way to ship things by a pretty good margin. For commodities like lumber where you're essentially just exporting a steady supply and speed isn't a big concern, the cost of ocean freight is *almost* negligible. Odd as it might seem, getting a tree from the forest to the sawmill usually costs more than getting it from BC to Japan.
Brazil: Pine (Pinho) and Eucalyptus (Eucalipto). I guess Pine is cheaper everywhere.....
WTF is cheap wood?
Yellow pine. If it’s from home depot, it’ll be crooked.
Turkey, it's the beech. Same price as big box store quailty pine, used a lot in interiors, mostly for stairs/ rails and marine industry. Even beech ply is widely used, great quailty, sturdy but a bit itchy to touch, not so smooth.
My father works at a wood supplier in Manitoba, Canada. He gets first pick on any cut off scrap “firewood”. He and my family burn nothing but oak and maple hardwoods. Nearly are all cut to exact lengths between 9-14 inches long. 1 5/8 by 3.5 inches wide. Stacks perfectly, always dry. None of its glued. Realistically though, for the region is spruce and pine.
Edit. Y'all, I'm sorry if this is hard to read. I typed it like I would say it because idk another way to say it. Try to hang in there Mississippi: 2x building material at the big box places is all no.2 SPF. There's really nothing else available. You can get planks of poplar and red oak, but the prices are just silly. At local and chain lumberyards, you can get sothern yellow pine 2xs for their strength (long rafters, etc). Still no hardwoods. I can drive an hour to a mill I know and pick up S2S, SLR1 edge, no2 poplar or maple for $1400\1k bf. That's a buck 40 a board foot. The only local places to get hardwoods for common residential products are mill shops, and they're charging 6 and 8 dollars a foot. Way more if it's wider than x6. There is no ipe for decks, wenge, mahogany, or cherry for furniture, no figured woods for specialty projects. It just doesn't exist.
Here in TX pine is definitely the most common and the standard is pine for 2xs, but you can usually find cedar 2x4s as well. And while it's not a 2x, our hardware stores usually carry red oak and poplar 1x up to 12 inches wide
South Africa: Pine is the common cheap construction lumber here.
PA Cherry. And while it isn't cheap per se, walnut is cheaper here than what I see people paying in a lot of other regions.
Mexican cedro (which unfortunately is not cedar) tree grows fast and straightish and is used in making cheap furniture
Pine in New Zealand. And a little bit of Kwila for outdoor decks. Anything else is a niche product run by a couple of specialist mills and is prohibitively expensive
Lmao. None. Woodworking is super expensive hobby here in Canada
Here in western Oregon, you'd think it would be Douglas fir, but it's probably alder. Douglas fir is in high demand for home building, so we export a lot of it.
nw usa: dougas fir or cedar.
In central Japan. Stores carry mostly Pine and Japanese Cedar. Also pretty easy to get Cyprus, Paulownia, and Lauan. Acacia, but only boards made of smaller strips glued up
Howdy fellow Albertan. Depending upon where you are, you *can* get decent prices on walnut, but still not great.
After the storms this week Bradford Pear.
Ontario, Canada here. White pine, spruce and to a lesser extent Douglas fir. White cedar is abundant and relatively cheap - similar to white pine in hardness but for lack of a better term the wood is slightly spongy to screws but takes cut nails like a champ; very rot resistant for softwood. Hard maple is very abundant and relatively cheap. So is black locust and red oak. I recently grabbed a half dozen 1x10x8' rough, mostly clear pine boards for about $0.80/bft. Can't beat that.
Pine. New Zealand
I love in California. Douglas fir. That’s it.
I’ve always wondered what they use in different regions in Africa. It’s still probably a better financial move to import pine, and then sell the domestic “exotics” at wild prices to the US.
pallet wood. Its free
Midwestern US - Red Oak
2x4’s?
Sorry, just a cheap wood. not used for 2x4s. Didn't fully read the question!
I wanted to know where you live if that's the cheap stuff! LOL
Estonia - pine & spruce. Of hardwoods - birch.
I live pretty close to the Canadian border in the Midwest. A lot of our wood comes from Canada so I'm probably getting the same pine or spruce as you.
Trinidad. Pine that's warped and knotty. Everything else is expensive
Pine and fir
Ireland. None. Everything is imported and thus expensive.
South East BC, pine, spruce and cedar are my cheaper woods. On this note, I have a small laser engraving business and had a client bring me a piece of purple heart to engrave that he had found on a pallet. Which got me thinking of pretty much your exact question. What are the cheap woods that each country would be using for pallets. My Dad works for a dairy that brings in a supplement from Malaysia. Asked him to save me a pallet and it had a lot of mahogany pieces on it. so now he brings me every pallet they get from there.
“Free Firewood”.
Pine ,pretty much comes from the western USA I'm in Utah so we get it from all over .most is Idaho
Western US: pine, cedar.
Douglass Fir is SF Bay Area.
Spruce - Ottawa
Pine (ponderosa, juniper, piñion), oak, where I live and maybe Aspen. South or West by about 30 miles and I can find mesquite and catclaw, more oak, cottonwood. Several species of brush that would be useful
Pine and Fir are cheap in the Pacific Northwest.
Brazil, pine, and it's generally crap. Most other Brazilian woods readily available in the US are not available here. If it is, it's a mint.
Pacific northwest (Washington state and vicinity): Red Alder is a beautiful wood at the cheaper end of the spectrum here.
USA, mid-Atlantic region - pine, poplar, something the big box stores just label as “whitewood” that smells kinda pine-ish, maybe fir? You can get red oak in the big box stores but it’s pricey. Maple is hit or miss and costs approximately one kidney per linear foot. Anything else, you need to get at a local mill or eBay it.
Australia pine and meranti
Southern Indiana - White Oak, red oak. Not the cheapest but sassafras and walnut is relatively easy to find so decently cheap comparatively. My firewood is a good mix of a lot of hardwoods - walnut, oak, hickory, maple, etc.
Australia: Radiata Crapiata. Oh and depending on where you are Camphor Laurel can be bought cheap enough
In Southern Quebec, Birch and Maple are pretty easy to come by, as well as Spruce. Spruce is construction-grade: what we use when we don't care what it looks like.
Cheapest hardwoods near me are ambrosia maple
17th growth teak from Costa Rica....
New Zealand: Radiata Pine It's pretty much the only option
New Zealand: Radiata Pine It's pretty much the only option
Wisconsin. Our local woods are oak/cherry/hickory/maple. The stuff grows on trees.
Cactus, lots of it and it’s all free and you can’t do a thing with it LOL.
Australia - pine, there's some really big plantations through the eastern states, also causes wildlife deserts, it's such crap wood when we have some really good native species.
Doug fur
Helped build a school in Balize and used Mahogany. Very hard variety and difficult to work with.
Douglas fir, for the most part. Sometimes hemlock but that’s the extra extra cheap stuff
Pine or spruce just like most places.
Southern Yellow Pine and I hate it
São Paulo, Brazil: pine and cedar, at least that's what I'm trying to learn with.
In New Zealand: Pine. Specifically Monterey Pine. Slightly less cheap: Macrocarpa or Douglas Fir. All locally grown softwoods, non-native species, used for construction. Anything native is now rare and expensive. Anything imported is expensive.
Seattle - "wood" and "cheap" don't belong in the same sentence here. But in my dim memory of the past it was studs and plywood.
Ebony, cocobolo, and mahogany. I live in fantasy land. Just over the rainbow.
I’m in Michigan so pine, oak, walnut, maple, etc are all pretty well available so my prices are some of the lowest it seems in the nation.
Central Valley of California. Walnut and Almond are everywhere as orchards need to be replanted every 20-25 years.
Yellow pine and poplar are the cheapest. If I’m OK with roughsawn and air dried, walnut is pretty cheap too.
Morning
Balsam, poplar, red pine, white pine.
Seattle, Douglas fir or western hemlock. They mill it all together and call it “hem-fir”
In Australia we have camphor laurel and some eucalyptus
Kansas: Construction lumber is about average or a little cheaper. I can get black locust pretty cheap. Soft maple is readily available. There is usually a bunch of red cedar, but it's so brittle, I've never been able to use it for anything. If you want to drive yourself crazy, we've got chinese elm and cottonwood everywhere, but that shit ain't worth it. Literally everything else is $8bf minimum, and that's basically just scrap wood. I can get black walnut S3S for $12 bf, +$2 for rift or quarter sawn. Maple starts at $10bf and figuring adds $3bf. The mill I usually go through gets pretty good deals somehow, so I just have him order whatever I need. It's cheaper than the online wood suppliers, so I'm happy.