Selecting Wood

Ok after getting my area ready to work, taking several days to do between work and just finding all the materials I needed. I scrounged up some 2 by 4’s and some old florescent fixtures. I had to take 4 of the old fixtures to make two good ones. Then I tested them all out before hanging them and wiring them up. That was a project in itself.

Now that all was setup I laid out my plans and read them from top to bottom and thought about the way they were made. That took me several ours one evening, there was a lot to think about trust me.

The next day I went to the lumber yard just to check on costs of the lumber. I live in a small town and want to spend my money local. So that means having them special order in the materials. I live in the Midwest and finding Marine grade plywood is impossible. The small town I live in has a population of 2500 so they don’t stock a lot of boat building supplies. I took my list of materials that were supplied by Glen L and handed them to there material buying guy at the lumber yard. Buying marine grade materials was something new to him and he has been there since the 70’s. I will say he was actually pretty excited to take on the challenge and to break up the monotony of buying home building materials. He made calls to at least 3 vendors in the state of Missouri while I sat that there and one had 4 sheets. Well at least that would get me started while I waited for the rest of it to come in. It will be several days just to get the 4 sheets in but that is ok I have other things I can start working on waiting for the materials to show up.

I also did some research that evening on Google about what types of wood I can use since some of it is hard to come by here. I found that Douglas fir was also used to build boats and that is a lot easier to come by here and not only that it’s about half the costs of Mahogany and Oak. I can get Oak local that is a tree that is very popular here and Douglas fir is also a very common building material here. I am going to the lumber yard tomorrow to see if that is something we can get a lot of, which I am sure it will be.