Old Growth Lumber

One of the things that I get asked about quite often with different kinds of material, is what's the deal with old growth lumber. Woodworkers talk about this in revered and hushed tones, and I wanna help you understand why it's a big deal. So I've got some boards here for you to look at. Some are old growth and some are not. So let me first talk about some characteristics here, starting with this piece of red oak on the bottom.

What I've done on these boards is I've marked out an inch. The reason being, I want you to have a look at the number of growth rings per inch as we work our way through these different materials. So this piece of red oak on the bottom, that's got about eight or ten growth rings per inch. Coming up to the pine above it, if we have a look at those marks that's down to about four growth rings per inch. Now on the other pile, I've got old growth lumber.

The bottom is what's called flame birch. That's got so many growth rings per inch, I can't tell you how many they are. They're so close together, can't even count them. Right above that is a piece of Ponderosa pine. I counted that one out, that's about 35 growth rings per inch.

So that helps us understand the growth rings. What's the big deal? How does that come to happen? With this old growth lumber, when those trees were growing they were in a natural forest. So what would happen is say, let's pick an oak tree, an acorn falls, starts growing into a sapling.

As it grows, it's surrounded by other trees, there's a huge crown of forest above it. What that crown does is it limits the amount of water and light that that sapling gets. If we limit water and we limit light to a plant, what's gonna happen? It grows slowly. Now the deal with annual rings is that you earn an annual ring by getting through a year.

So every time that tree grows through one year, it gets another ring. So the rings are very, very close together on this old growth stuff, because the tree grew naturally in a forest and its growth rate was very, very, very slow so the growth rings are really close together. When we grow stuff today, which is a little bit more like tree farming, we've probably got a tree in the middle of a field growing with all the sunlight it can get, whatever rain falls falls on it. So it grows at a much faster rate. When that tree is mature, we harvest it, plant another tree, treating it kinda like a big corn field.

So they're growing much faster, that makes the growth rings further apart. Who cares? Well for one, instrument makers care. People who make especially stringed instruments, guitars, violins, they would prefer the density of this old growth material. It gives the wood a much better resonance for that instrument, provides a much better sound.

Also in general, we can say that with more growth rings per inch, we get a more stable piece of wood. The other thing that I really like about it is the history. Let's have a look again at this old growth stuff. The piece on the bottom is a very, got a real interesting story. In my neck of the woods, I'm pretty close to Lake Superior.

These are actually boards that came from logs that were salvaged from the bottom of Lake Superior. That type of log has been reclaimed. That's what they call that wood. So the log comes up off the bottom of Lake Superior, it was actually harvested maybe a hundred, 150 years ago. As they were booming them down the lake, they lost a log or two, over hundreds of years of bringing logs down the lake they lost a lot of logs.

So companies are bringing them up and converting them today. Being under water didn't hurt them at all, 'cause they were dripping wet the whole time. So they bring them up, they mill them, they sell them. So it's very cool that that tree was cut a long time ago out of Northern Minnesota, and I've got access to it today. The stuff on top is salvaged lumber.

That piece of Ponderosa pine in its first life, was in a building someplace. When the building was destined to be torn down, rather than just knock it down with a wrecking ball, a company went in and they took it down a stick at a time. They clean it up, they resell it. That's why that piece Ponderosa pine has got nail holes in it. Those nail holes are left from the manner in which it was originally used.

Now this one's pretty cool. I know that that wood was used in about 1900 or 1920. I sat with my kids one time and counted growth rings on one of these Ponderosa pine boards. And we had well over 200 rings from the pith, the center of the tree, to the edge of the board. So that count alone took us from 1900 to 1700, when that tree first started growing.

And realistically that board wasn't 12 inches wide when the tree was cut down, it was probably 24 inches wide. So add a bunch more growth rings onto that. That's an old, old, old tree. You've got your hand on a piece of wood here that was probably growing in this country before it was settled by the Pilgrims. So it's a very, very neat thing to know about, and hopefully helps you understand the differences and the benefits of old growth wood compared to the stuff we're typically working with today.