Our Timber

We buy standing timber twice a year and saw it ourselves. That is unusual, it is slow, and it is the only way to know what is actually inside a board before it becomes a table.

Four species, chosen and then stuck with

A workshop that offers forty timbers knows none of them. We work in white oak, black walnut, black cherry and white ash, and we have built the whole range around how those four behave — how far each one moves between a wet August and a dry January, how each takes an oil finish, and what each one looks like after ten years in a north-facing room.

The comparator below is built from published figures, not marketing. Janka is side hardness in pounds-force. The movement figure is tangential shrinkage from green to oven-dry, which is what decides whether a wide panel has to float in its frame or can be glued solid.

[hg_timber]

From standing tree to stickered board

Logs are through-and-through sawn at 32 mm and 54 mm, stickered with 22 mm battens and left in the open-sided shed for two full years. Only then do they go into the kiln, and the kiln only takes them the last four percentage points down to 7%. Air-drying first is what stops the case-hardening you get when a board is rushed — the outside shrinks onto a still-wet core and the stresses stay locked in until somebody rips the board and it closes on the blade.

Every board is metered at three points before it is cut, and again on the finished piece before it leaves. That reading is printed on the specification of the piece you buy.