Using Pine

[Ryan McShane]

Hi everyone. I am new to this forum but have been reading up on many of the threads and it looks like this is a really great avenue to get some tough questions answered.

I am getting ready to choose some woods for my canoe and really want to use pine. The problem is that clear pine is about double the cost of some grade 1 pine that I looked at. The grade 1 had some knots but I am really not too concerned because I will be using some scarf joints and plan on just cutting them out of the equation all together.

A buddy of mine says that the grade 1 or 2 is not a good choice simply because it's construction grade and not finish grade. What types of problems do you expect me to run into using this grade 1? The grain on it looks pretty tight and overall pretty straight so I don't think that milling it with bead and cove will be an issue as far as brittleness of cove is concerned. How about finish sanding? Will there be any issues with pine as opposed to cedar or redwood? I have worked with clear cedar and redwood on a kayak so I know that it doesn't get much better than that, I just wanted to do something different. So should I cough up the extra dough and buy clear pine or can I get away with this stuff?

Thanks,

Ryan
Grand Haven, MI

 

[Dan Lindberg]

Hi Ryan,

Just to clarify, are you specifically looking at pine, and if so, which species, or are you using "pine" in a genaric sense and mean any conifir?

For example, when you go into the place you are getting the wood from, how is the wood labled? SPF, FIR, Spruce, or have you found something labled as "Pine"?

As for the difference between clear and #1 or 2 "pine", if the species is the same, I would guess the workability would also be about the same, other then the knots of course.

But I would also suspect that as you go up in grade, maybe the species would also change, for example, from say a red pine 2x4 to sugar pine trim.

In this case, I suspect that the sugar pine would be softer and easier to work then the red pine.

Dan

 

[Ryan McShane]

The "pine" in question is Sterling Idaho White Pine.

 

[Jan Bloom]

What sort of canoe are you planning to build? Grand Rapids is only a few hours away from some really good sources of clear white cedar at very good prices. The advantages of using cedar far outweigh disadvantages.

 

[Todd Bradshaw]

Assuming that they're equally dry and have fairly similar lack of grain run-out, the pine isn't going to know whether it's Grade#1 or grade#2. Different woods have different weights, crush characteristics, different ratios of stiffness to weight and different amounts of twist tolerance before they shatter - but considering that you can sucessfully make a very similar boat using strips of closed-cell foam as a core (which actually has pretty flimsy structural characteristics by itself) just about any wood is up to the task as long as it will take the bends. Compared to cedar, you'll probably gain maybe 3-4 lbs. with pine on a typical canoe.

So far, I think I've seen strippers built from cedar (both red and white) sitka spruce (my favorite, but very expensive these days) redwood, pine, fir, mahogany, basswood, poplar, some sort of cypress (we don't have it up here, so I don't know much about it) and even balsa. Pound for pound, the spruce was probably the strongest and the red cedar the lightest (I don't know what the balsa hull weighed). All of them worked and the quality is usually more a matter of workmanship than it is a matter of what wood is used for the core.

Personally, I prefer butt joints on strips, rather than scarph joints. They take less time and I think they look cleaner and call less attention to themselves - especially once faired on areas where the boat has a curved cross section, a place where the ends of scarphs become curves, rather than a straight line across the strip. Different strokes......