Timber Purchase

Went to Mathews Timber to purchase the wenge, hard rock maple and padouk that I needed for the timber sections for the cabinet. I will be coming back later in the year to buy some more materials more just smaller pieces that I will use for other inlay sections for the cherry blossom inlay. 

http://mathewstimber.com.au/ This is there website. It has some quite useful information on it and has majority of their timbers online. Although due to the economic problems Australia has been having some of their exotic timbers like purple heart and babinga rose wood they do not have and will not be getting unless there is a big enough order. 

I didn't buy that much padouk since I didn't require that much this was the smallest piece that I could find in the timber yard.

I decided to buy a little more wenge than I needed since I had a few things I wanted to add to the final piece if I had time. If I had some of the wenge left over I would use it for further projects. I have about half the pack of quarter cut wenge left over so the solid timber pieces could go with this.

This is the hard rock maple that I bought also know as American maple.


What you need to look for when selecting timber is to make sure that the boards are relatively straight, limited cupping/ bowing and no twists. You won't find everything totally perfect since this is at its rough stage. All timber will shift differently to one another and even though its not in log form its still a natural product and will shift over time.

You want to make sure not to select timber that has defects like high knots etc thats if your not wanting them in your design piece.

There will be some checking in the boards. Generally you want to measure into the costing and material selection that there will be about 15 % of wastage after machining. This is due to cutting the ends usually 80-100mm in due to checks, planing faces and edges to get flat than mirroring these in the thicknesser. Riping boards down etc etc.

If you have a large check in the board which is what I had you want to see if the check is going straight. If your timber has a very straight grain usually the check will continue on that grain path. If your timber has grain that is going in different directions than this type of check could go in any direction. Some times its best to cut the board down before any further damage happens.

At the moment its the start if winter so I'm not too fust plus most of the machining will take place soon.

The checks I had in the wenge were not bad they were going straight and I could still cut them out without losing heaps of waste.

These are the timber racks of the different species. Most of the main stock of timbers are in storage in the other sheds on the property.

Storage section for the main stock timbers.

This was good to find out since I did not know that this was here. At Mathews timbers they have their own lathe work shop.

Another shot of the lathe work shop.

They also have a larger machine shop section that does a lot of the dressing, and molding. They sell a lot of cladding

Some of the other shots of the machine shop.

This chamber is a steam chamber.

Kiln chamber.

After been taken out of the steam chamber timber is usually left out in the yard for about 6 weeks.

Timber loaded into back of ute. The good thing about Mathews Timber is that you can select your own timber.

Un loading timber into work shop from ute.

Gathered all my offcuts of MDF and particle board to rip into 35mm strips than dock into 380mm and 300mm pieces to use as stickets.

I don't have timber racks in my work shop so these boards will be sitting on my work horses where I had the veneer on.

Stickets ready to be places between boards.

Laid out the stickets for boards to sit on. Normally you would not need to do this since these boards are already kiln dried. I just do this to get more air flow running through them before machining. My work shot gets quite cold and gets a lot of moisture in the air so I figured it would be best to stack the boards properly.

I'm still using the figured maple veneer so I have not moved it to another area yet. The wenge veneer I have finished with so I have moved it up onto two of the larger cabinets on the other side of the work shop and placed weight on it. The maple will be moved up there as well when I'm done with it.

Timber stacked up. When the figured maple veneer is moved from here I'll split up the the timber back.

Placed some weight on the pack. The maple and the padouk was a bit bowed so this will get some of the bowing out. The wenge was quite straight.