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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Choosing Beggars
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Stories of people who are being way too picky when it comes to who they beg for a relationship or any other matter.
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Not at all. The money is in the work and time it takes to produce a quality wood product.
I build custom furniture and have had many people offer me a downed tree. It has cut to rough length, slabbed, prepared for drying, properly dried and stored for at least 1 year per inch of thickness before you start working with it. I can cut into a board and know when someone has rushed it, and it can be downright dangerous. Improperly dried wood has a lot of internal stress that makes it pop violently when cut. Then it curves and warps and you might not even be left with much good material at all by the time you joint and plane it to be straight and flat.
I met with a local forester hired by the district I live in (a city in Denmark ) on friday to discuss some options for a local forest area that had been unattented for many years.
He suggested we thin it out and although maybe 50 to 100 trees needed removing we would not have to pay for it but would make money on it.
He said that the craziest thing he had experienced was that they had been able to sell poplar tree to India!!! Because of COVID, a lot of empty containers were in Europe. Instead og shipping them back empty, they're filled it with poplar tree to make matches.
The point is that we wouldn't have to pay to have a week's work of tree cutting but would be making money (mostly beech wood). I am sure that the value is increased manyfold during processing and woodworking but raw wood is worth good money too, and there's a lot of wood in large trees
Good for you! Genuinely. The difference here is the market and volume. Europe vs US, and 50-100 large trees vs one right next to a house. I'm not saying raw wood is worthless, but people in the US get an overinflated sense of what they're one 30-40 yr old tree in their yard is worth. You got a forest? That's a whole different ballpark. In the US, that's not a scenario where you pay, that's when you take bids to buy.
Poplar is useful wood. I don't know much about the Asian market, but it's your go-to soft but still considered hardwood, often paint grade wood. Excellent for plywood, great for furniture (usually with veneer) and trim, and apparently matches haha. It grows straight, tall, and with minimal limbs and large knots. I love working with it.