Q&A: Lumber by the pound?

Do it!

If the price is right…

Dry it inside if you can. Shellac the end grain. Stack with stickers and cement bags so it doesn’t curl.

I never did that before, so my advice is worth exactly what you’re paying for it. ;-)

Brian,

This is another topic moved from Forums. Unfortunately the old answers don’t move with the questions, so I guess this shouldn’t have been moved. Here are the responses which I thought were very informative.

shipwright
7 years ago
Hi L/W,
I have had the experience but it was a little different. When I bought sawn veneer in Paris, most of it, although unexplainable not all of it, was sold by the kilogram. I suspect that the reason was that it was very valuable and with irregular shaped pieces area or volume measures would be difficult. Most were in the $130 – $195 range per kilo.
Raw slabs…… you’d have to go and look at what you were buying, weigh it, get the price and decide if it looked worth it to you. :-)

The early bird gets the worm but its the second mouse that gets the cheese.
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Ellen
7 years ago
I wonder if they sell cheese by the board foot.
Maybe it’s a European thing…

Ellen
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lanwater
7 years ago
Ebony and other rare lumber short are sold sometimes by the pound. I saw that several times online and locally. I usually avoid those as they tend to be very expensive as they are, most of the time, pretty dense heavy wood.

Abbas, Castro Valley, CA
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Mike40
7 years ago
It would sure make it hard to compare prices. Sounds calculating to me, but it doesn’t hurt to have a look.

Mike, an American living in Norway
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Wolf (& Rabbit!)
7 years ago
I found a few sellers here in Britain that measure the wood in metric and sell it by the cubic foot….bloody annoying.

- Alec (Friends call me Wolf, no idea why)
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Lightweightladylefty
7 years ago
This was a Portage, Wisconsin seller. I’ve seen small off-cuts sold by the pound, but not large slabs. Paul’s comment about irregular-shaped pieces got me to thinking that maybe they’ve priced it that way because the “living edge” (I would refer to it as live edge) is so wavy that they felt it was too difficult to calculate board feet.

According to Paul’s per kilo prices, this is a real steal!

Ellen, I’ll have to see if we can get a better deal on cheese by the board foot! LOL

I understand that sometimes paper mills buy by the ton rather than by the cord to avoid paying too much for punky, rotting wood. I would think that could cause the mill to get “soaked” (pay too much) when the wood has been sitting in the rain.

Thanks for all your input.

L/W

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin