Category Archives: Other

Saturday morning found me standing in a line in sunny 25 degree weather waiting to take a look at the “Urban Wood Sale” put on by the Montgomery County Parks and Rec folks. In the course of the year they save the larger trees they cut down in the course of operations and saw them into boards and even dry them in kiln. Then they have this sale in December to clear out the year’s accumulated stock and raise a little money.

It was pushed pretty heavily on Facebook, though I spend so little time there, I still wouldn’t have seen it, but several people, including Jess, did the Facebook thing that made it appear to me. In principal, I am completely behind any scheme that keeps perfectly good timber from being turned into mulch. So, I intended to show up, not find anything worth and buy a board anyway to support the cause.

I didn’t expect to find much to  my liking because the sorts of trees they cut down are what I call yard trash. They don’t grow in forests, they grow singly or in some scraggy once was a forest but now is a park. So the tree got subjected to all kinds of stress while growing and with access to light from all direction, didn’t grow straight up. So you get a look of “pretty” good, but not high quality furniture making wood. And, that’s exactly what they had, but there’s a story before we get to that.

Reading their Facebook page on the sale, I noted one commenter stating that the crowds were crazy last year. Hmm, last year people were still fairly concerned about the plague, so if crowds were crazy…let’s get there early and get through this evolution before crowds, shall we?

With that in mind, I arrived at 8:05 am for their 8am to 2pm sale. The site, a large complex of county offices and maintenance buildings, had helpful signs and a crew of folks in ANSI Green directing you to parking. That was nice. I parked the truck as instructed and followed people walking down that road and around a corner where I found… a huge line. /sigh.

Even though the pictures of previous events showed the inside of a large building, I assumed that the rolling doors would be up at least partially to allow loading, so I dressed warmly. Solid plan. You can always take a layer off, but that guy ahead of me in line? The one in shorts and a hoodie? He was fucked. He pretended to not be cold to his companions, but no one breaks the laws of thermodynamics.

Anyway, there were, and I had time to count, 65 people in front of me waiting to enter the building. Was this a case of some county level government workers not really ready at 8am as planned? No. Word came down that they were only allowing 30 people in at a time. Not due to plague considerations, almost no one was even wearing a mask, but simply space. So that means there were at least 30 additional people ahead of me, already inside. Nice. I zipped up the coat and settled in for a nice stand in the shadows of huge tree killing equipment while the line slowly shuffled forward.

The woman handling the door was allowing people in periodically in groups of 5-10 as, presumably, people left. But I saw only one or two people leaving by that door, so you must be leaving from the back side or  something. Fine, whatever, at this rate I was looking at 30 minutes or more of waiting. Fine. One thing I am good at is living in my head, killing time. I was dressed appropriately, had had a small breakfast and enough caffeine that I was good.

My hearing has lately degraded to the point where hearing other people is a chore, so I am far less distracted by chatter while listening to the voices in my head. But, of course, the people right in front of me were close enough to hear and it was one guy speaking (facing me which is why I could hear him at all) to an older (than me) gentleman and his wife.

Speaker was my age or a little younger and dressed in that casual way that said “I make good money and normally wear business casual or better to work,” not worked for a living. Where the couple were older than me sufficient that I was sure the gentleman was one of the legion of retirees that dabble in woodworking to Do Something while retired.

I locked into the conversation when the speaker started waxing rhapsodic about table saws. This is a subject I have more than a passing familiarity with as the plug-in power tool I use most and have for the last25 years. So, I wanted to hear what Socrates had to say.

Nothing very interesting, unfortunately. He was talking about how, in his opinion, the splitter was the superior safety device to the blade gear. Which is correct, but not for the reasons he was using. The splitter, for those not familiar, is a small bit of metal that sticks up behind the blade that is exactly the width of the cut and no higher than the blade. This bit of metal keeps the wood from closing up as the cut proceeds, pinching the blade and causing the table saw to spit the board at you at high speed (the blade turns towards you). So, yeah, important. I have fired boards across the room before I had one installed on my saw and have a slowly healing scar from when this occurred while I was reaching over for a push stick (you should always stand so if that happens, the board misses you).

His belief was that the blade guard only served to keep you from placing your hand on the spinning blade from above. Baffling. And that all the injuries he’s seen came after the user had finished the cut and was extended out over the table. OK, possible. Though, I have cut myself twice on the table saw and neither times was that the case.

From the conversation, I deduced that these two knew each other from the woodworking clue based at the Rockville Woodcraft store. It’s a nice space with all the fancy power tools that they hope to hook you on and sell you. But, much like gym memberships, the reality of using the facility doesn’t match your hopes. It’s expensive, there are Other People in the shop, usually too many for you to comfortably use the tools you are there to use, etc.

So that’s the level of shop experience they had, what’s the incident rate of injuries there? This guy might spend one night a week there, say, but I doubt they could afford that many injuries where his body of experience supported him going on about safety measures.

Whatever. I had, counting heads again, 45 people to go.

One virtue of spending the last 3 years working from home, married to a stay-at-home dog mom and fellow introvert and having a solitary hobby like woodworking is that I have improved my ability to keep my mouth shut. So it was here.

The next topic Mr. Expert weighed in on was oak. Now, you can lambast power tools all you want. They are inherently unsafe and I use hand tools wherever I can. But. There’s oak and there’s Other Wood. About 90% of everything I make is oak and the part that isn’t is something else by request (purpleheart leaps to mind). So when it comes to the virtues and foibles of quercus rubra or quercus alba, I got it covered

His first project was a night stand which he said turned out “alright even though it was white oak, which is stringy and prone to tear out and they warned us about that.” True. And that, “you have to score every cut or it will splinter like crap.” False, sharpen your shit much? And more in this vein for a bit. I managed to hold my tongue.

Next he moved on to chairs. They seem Really Hard. There are all these…joints (apparently the term “mortise and tenon” was not on the tip of his wagging tongue). And they are hard (I thought about the couch I built last winter, 80 M&T joints). And it’s amazing how in the posts the ends of the tenons have to be mitered to fit just so. No, they are mitered to maximize the long grain to long grain surface area for glue, they don’t normally actually touch, there’s no point to that. Glue doesn’t hold end grain worth a damn. And, for chairs, these have to be at angle (other than 90 degrees) True and that’s hard (not really).

At this point, I was practically vibrating. Jaw clamped, grim face enabled.

Turning to me, “so what do you make?”

“Chairs. Out of oak.”

“Oh.”

Ending the interlude. Probably why I don’t get invited to many dinner parties. HAHA. At that point I tuned out completely and calmly waited the final 20 minutes before I was allowed to enter the inner sanctum hosing all the…yard trash lumber I expected.

The Park and Rec people are real good at cutting trees down, not so good at making usable lumber. Everything was simply slabbed trees. And since the trees are all park tress and such, few were very wide, though there were some exceptions especially in walnut.

They had a lot of ash. I looked there because they aren’t making it anymore in our area thanks to the Emerald borer. But most of what they had was cut from standing deadwood and had some punky areas where rot was starting to set in. I don’t need that headache.

The room was small, 30 people, plus staff was being generous. It was basically an industrial 2 bay garage, you know, for large trucks like they have. And there were piles of wood laid out in rows. Plus they had at least a dozen folks there to help you go through the stacks, mark your selections while you paid and even help you load. That was nice. And, as I had guess, the load out happened through the bay door opposite of the side we had been standing.

Oh and lest you think I was a dolt and the last one to arrive at this magical wood sale, there were at least 150 people still in line when I left at 9:15. I thought to myself, “I hope these folks have low expectations.” Because about half the wood was already gone and what’s left…well, splits, knots, bug holes, etc.

Prices were reasonable. Most of the wood was roughly 6/4, so you could count on a full inch thick board after planing. I selected the 3 best boards I could and got out of there. I probably would have only bought the one 6.5′ ash board that was 16″ wide (for $50) except one of their guys started helping me sort through the oak and I just took two. A 18″ or so wide red oak board about 8′ long and a white oak board 8″ or 10″ wide. These are edge to edge boards, not “lumber” so, I had to jig saw off the young wood (and the attendant bug holes), whack off 4-6″ from each end because of the cracks caused by kiln drying (because they didn’t know you have to coat the end grain to slow the moisture release, or didn’t care).

So I donated $200 to Montgomery County Parks and Rec and took some mostly usable wood off their hands. And was home by a little after 10am including a stop at my favorite bagelry on New Hampshire Ave.