Making sawdust

One of the many things I didn't understand about woodworking before this project began was what's involved when you want to use decent wood for a project. As I already mentioned, you can't just hop in the car and head over to Lowe's or Home Depot. While they have some premium wood it's expensive the sizes aren't really adequate for what you need. So you have to go to a place like we did and get rough cut lumber. The sizes are measured in quarters; we bought 8/4 maple which means that the boards are 2 inches thick and ranged from 6 to 9 inches wide. All the boards were about 8 feet long. You are charged by the board foot (1 board foot would be a piece of wood 1 foot long one foot wide and 1 inch thick).



Because the lumber is rough cut you can't really see what the grain looks like until you get it back to the shop and joint it. In the picture above you can see the difference in our maple stock.



It's also important to find wood that is relatively straight (without curves, bows and cups). We thought we had done this, but when it came time to joint and plane the wood almost half the boards had some serious problems. We were still able to salvage almost all of it, but sometimes in the process we reduced the thicknes of the board from 2 inches to 1 1/2 inches. You can see some of the cupping that we had to deal with in the picture above.

What happens to that wasted 1/2 inch?