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DIYers - wood buying advice...
Hey peeps.
I wanna get some wood for some acoustic panels I want to build. I want the cheapest nastiest stuff, provided it is structurally sound and isn't going to fall apart on me. It wont be on display, it's literally just a big picture frame.
So I'm thinking something like pine or redwood? I want planed 25x100mm boards, ideally cut to length but if not then at least 1.5m per board. I need 24m aroundabouts, and I can cut them myself.
I need 12x 1240mm lengths, and 12x 600mm widths. Slab a block of Rockwool in it, cover it in some pretty looking fabric... job should be a good'n!
So where is the best place to look? I'm in London, and I'm scoping things out. Looked at The Builder Depot. Looks like £36 for the wood, but £48 for delivery... which is kinda extreme. Hoping to do better than that. There is a Travis Perkins up the road from me, but I heard they rip off the public, I've got a quote request in with them anyway just to get a price. Jewsons don't have public prices it seems, so gotta call them up.
I'd rather go to a smaller business, but I know shit all about buying wood, and I'm hoping for a bit of guidance!
We did this at work recently, but the lengths we got were a lot longer than mine, and my boss handled it all so I don't know how much she paid. I'm gonna ask her, but thought I'd ask here too.
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Comments
Redwood in the UK is pine, Scot's pine usually, not Metasequioa. Call up a timber merchants and you'll get some decent stuff with a low moisture content that size. Jewson's expensive nbut decent whitewood.
Can you not use MDF? Or cheasp foreign ply or Wisa board birch play is quite fancy and a bit more expensive.
I just scored a load of 1/2 inch x 8" stuff free as offcuts at our local timber yard. Perfect for making drawers with.
Go to a proper timber yards and they'll have everything from Meranti to Sapele to Albizia, cut to your specs.
You will pay over the odds for anything over 6 inches at 19 or 25mm thick.
You're thicknesses in PAR (Planed all Round) joinery quality softwood will be 16 up to 75mm wide. 19 up to 175mm and 25 up to 300mm from a good timber merchant, although you will pay over the odds for something that wide.
Those thicknesses are before planing so take off another 5 or 6mm (1/4") for the actual thickness
You have to think composite materials, nothing is great in it's own right. It's like the human race. Joinery softwood will warp. MDF has no tensile strength as t has no grain. Fuck, Orientated Strand Board (OSB) would do if there are enough battens to straighten and strengthen it. That stuff is cheapest. I'd go with OSB and a softwood frame, basically a shed roof and then staple your insulation to that and upholster it with your Sanderson.
40mm No. 5 Screws, sawn battens 1 x 1.5" for stuctural frame, drill, countersink bit, wood glue of you feel like an expert, chopsaw. measure tape, pencil and a bit of rough sandpaper on a block to smooth the edges.
B&Q will cut your OSB to size. 11mm or 18mm. 11 will do with a frame. Comes in 2440 x 1220 sheets (8' x 4').
I don't think OSB is recommended for speaker cabinets, although that might be because it looks messy, but it's the lightest, MDF or chipboard will weigh some, softwood will cost a small fortune and OSB is the cheapest and like I said I think B&Q will run the saw along it and charge you per cut and by the sounds of your metropolitan area it sounds like B&Q is probably your best option price wise
Just get a couple of 1240mm battens for it and some cross brace battens at 18" intervals or something, that'll be solid, could use 1" x 1", but I donno if B&Q do that size.
Seriously, the cheapest would actually be to steal someone's shed roof.
If you want a more substantial frame use CLS (Canadian Lumber Size), it's planed and has bevelled edges, 2 x 3 or 2 x 4 +
(45mm x 75 or 90 or 6" or 8" or whatever). It's cheap, used for stud walls and such. B&Q do that I am pretty sure.;
Any softwood timber at that thickness with those widths will be joinery graded and cost an absolute fortune. So much so that it won't be that much more to get American White Oak.
The only way to get thin, but wide softwood cheap is to go down to a sawmill get order some Douglas Fir or Larch Waney edge, but then the moisture content will be around 40%. I've got some I'm drying out left over from a shed I built for someone. 95% of it will split or warp, but hopefully there will be something I can plane and build something out of. Some of them are 50cm wide+.
A 12 stone full grown man can jump up and down on 11mm OSB with beams spaced at 40cm without it moving too much, on a shed roof if that gives you some idea. With beams at 60cm, it may bend a bit but bounce back, but you won't go through it unless it's wet and rotton. OSB, as a material is your lightest and strongest/weight option. Only problem is the splinters are evil and corners need support with a batten otherwise they splinter of dropped.
It doesn't needs battens for strength, it needs them for rigidity and to keep it straight and true and to protect the corners. Equivalent ply or MDF will be much heavier and MDF less strong at 11mm and ply about the same as OSB, maybe slightly stronger.
Yeah I reckon frame better, lighter and any board/sheet will have to be extra insulated to fight the reflection. When I'm making shed frames out of tannalised 4" CLS, I just drill a couple of screw holes across the grain in the long beams and slightly into the end grain of the perpendicular corner piece for location, then drive 160mm screws down into the end grain or countersink those hex head coach screws as they are quite good. It pulls it all tight and so long as it's square and flat and cut square, it stays square.
It looks like a sofa, basically light and nothing to it.
Actually the coachscrews that Jewson do are great, they come with a driver bit.
With moulding strips you might get away with a thin screw, but probably best biscuit joined and glued. You could always double up and offset the joins. Pity you haven't got a tablesaw, a biscuit joiner really and some sash clamps really.
You could always drill long countersinks and use smaller screws like No.4's.
Something that thin would be better off with rebated half lap joints or plates to keep it square. You can buy framing plates at the builders merchant.
FWIW I got my GIK panels from their eBay returns account, roughly 50% of new. When you do the bass traps definitely consider something bigger for the corners if you have space. The biggest change I noticed is when I got a pair of GIK soffits on customer return... yes they were still expensive but that is the first time bass actually noticeably started clearing up in the room.