Slippery White Oak Changes Woodworking History (Maybe, Kinda-Sorta)
When I build a piece of furniture I like to build my own drawers and drawer guides. The drawers make me feel like the furniture is more useful, like it has a reason for being. The key is that they must work well. I started out trying many different ways to make drawers operate, but have been using only one way for a long time now.
About ten years ago, I went to a presentation at a local furniture store about Stickley furniture. The one thing I keyed on that night was the video of a worker at the factory fitting a drawer and closing the drawer with just the push of a finger (video link below). I had been around plenty of drawers, especially old ones that don’t work properly, and I wanted to know more.
Now, I build every drawer side-hung and center-guided
The secret at Stickley (which isn’t much of a secret), and now at my shop, is the side-hung, center-guided drawer glides or runners. The drawers hang on runners mounted to the inside sides of the cabinet which are made to fit a little loose up and down and not touch the drawer at all left to right. This set up alone isn’t enough though. Without the center guide the drawers would rack in the opening and bind. The center guide under the middle of the drawer allows the drawer to only move in a straight line in and out, and it eliminates the possibility for racking. In fact, the drawer can only go in one direction and can easily be pushed shut with one finger from anywhere on the drawer front. Forget using both hands to push in the drawer.
The system works great and doesn’t take much fussing to install. After I fit the drawers and make sure they are working, I wax the guides with Johnson paste wax, and they work as smooth as silk. One of the keys to extra smooth operation is the use of white oak for the drawers and guides.
I don’t know Stickley’s intent on using white oak for the drawers and guides. I assumed originally that he just used white oak in the drawer system because he was using white oak on the rest of the cabinet, so it just made aesthetic sense to use the wood that was in the rest of the piece. But now, I am starting to think that ol’ Gustav came to using white oak through the back door. I am thinking that he found the perfect wood for drawers and drawer guides that also just happened to be a great wood for furniture – an awesome 1-2 punch. Here’s why: White oak is a hard wood, a very stable wood when quartersawn and also a very slippery wood. That’s right – slippery. Slippery is not the first adjective that comes to mind when you think about white oak, but it is slippery after it is planed. I can’t explain it, but if you take two planed pieces of white oak and stack them up, it is hard to keep them together. Plenty of times in the shop, when I am planing white oak, I slide a piece on to the stack and it just keeps going.
I haven’t noticed this phenomenon with any other woods, just white oak. It doesn’t seem slippery when I am pushing it through the jointer, in fact, just the opposite. On the jointer, it feels like it wants to stick to the bed. But once that white oak touches another piece of white oak it wants to take off. So, I am thinking Stickley noticed that white oak repels white oak like a reverse magnet and thought it would make the best drawer guides ever. Then he looked at white oak and said quietly to himself, “If I am going to use white oak, it has to be quartersawn to be as stable as possible.” He also knew that quartersawn white oak looked more refined and that it was expensive to produce, all of which makes the finished piece seem more valuable. He then loudly exclaimed, “Quartersawn white oak all around.”
And the rest is history (maybe, kinda-sorta). This, of course, doesn’t explain why he used white oak for chairs, but I choose to ignore that for now.
“The” White Oak
This photo shows the color of fresh cut white oak on the left and white oak that was out for hours after cutting on the right.
Today, I was working on the large white oaks from the previous blog post, and I had a chance to snap a quick photo of an interesting phenomenon. On the stack of white oak lumber that I cut yesterday, I added some fresh lumber from this morning. It just worked out that I had two boards next to each other that clearly demonstrated a color change in white oak. This doesn’t happen in just any white oak, it happens only in “The” white oak, the one that is commercially sold as white oak.
You see, there are many different species of white oak in the white oak family of trees, like burr oak, swamp white oak, post oak and others, but none change color like “The” white oak. The change starts quickly after the lumber is cut. The wood goes from a tan color to a tan-pink or even just pink within an hour. However, don’t get too attached to the color because after the lumber dries for a day or two the color migrates back to the original tan color.
“The” white oak is not the only one to change colors after being freshly cut, but it is the only one where the color change is a key identifier. Others that change color include walnut, which goes from a green-brown color to a medium-dark brown color with no hint of green. Another one is cedar, which goes from a vibrant pink/purple to a medium-dark brown. The only other one that changes color like the white oak is ash, which develops a pink cast to it that then fades away in a day.
“The” white oak is in the white oak family and called white oak. This is tricky because it doesn’t have another name that clearly identifies it. For example, in the red oak family, the most desired species is called Northern Red Oak. But in the white oak family, the most desired species is also called white oak. I know that many people, including myself in the past, may be cutting a tree and wonder if it is “The” white oak. If it turns pink shortly after you cut it, it is.
Big White Oaks
I want to have this blog be mostly educational, while at the same time entertaining. This one is more for entertainment.
It started with a call about having a tree milled. I talked to Ron (a first-time customer) on the phone to see what he needed. He said that he had a white oak that was down and another that he was going to have taken down, and that he wanted to find out about milling. We talked about sizes and basic pricing for my services and he agreed to have them milled. Ron told me they were about 30″ in diameter on the phone and didn’t sound at all excited about the size of the trees. In my experience that 30″ tree, especially if the customer isn’t gushing about how big it is, is only about 20″ in diameter. Still a good tree, but not that big.
I thought I would just stop by with my truck and load them up on my way to get another tree, assuming that I could get a couple of logs on my truck and have room for a few more. Well, I found Ron’s house at the end of a narrow lane, and all I could see in the clearing was log. Scratch that, logs – big logs. I knew that I was going to have to regroup after I saw the size of these trees. They weren’t the biggest that I have milled (I included a photo of that one too), but they have the most board feet for two trees. In total, the nine logs scale out (Doyle) to about 2500 board feet. My truck can handle about 900 board feet at a time if they fit perfect, but these were not going to fit perfect (more like just barely). I knew I would be lucky to get two on at a time, so I had to call in some backup. Did I mention that these were big?
Anyway, I have them back at the mill now and have started milling them. Most of them are going to be quartersawn, while the upper logs are going to be cut thicker for slabs to show off the curly lumber around some of the big branches. So far, two of them are milled and they look great. Oh, and big!
Considering Wood Movement
Running a sawmill and drying my own lumber has taught me a lot about wood movement. I know that some lumber, like cedar, dries quite flat and straight, and other lumber, like sweetgum, will dry like a potato chip. Quartersawn white oak lumber almost always dries with the ends pulling away from the center of the log, making a board with a nice sweeping bow. I also know that boards that are sapwood on one side and heartwood on the other will dry with a distinct cup. These are things that happen when wood dries from green to air-dry or about 20% moisture content, which is where the dramatic movement occurs.
Even after air drying and kiln drying wood still moves with humidity changes, and as woodworkers we have to consider this seasonal movement. This is the kind of thing I think about a lot, and recently I gave myself the chance to really think about it. I was building a table and the wood I wanted to use was not dry. It was white oak which sat on sticks air drying for a little while, but was still wet enough to be considered “green”. I decided that I new enough about wood movement to make it work, and since the table was a little rustic, that I should go for it.
The bases for the table were simple. I made sure all of the grain was going the same direction, so the shrinkage would happen evenly. It also worked out nicely that all of the pieces would have air movement on all sides so they would dry out at the same rate. So far all was good. I proceeded with the top. It was a glued-up top with breadboard ends (one board on each end perpendicular to the field). No big deal. If you do your breadboard ends correctly, everything can slide and allow the wood to move. I took all of that into consideration.
There was one thing I did not take into consideration. You see my brother tends to use my shop at night. I usually leave stuff in his way–after all, it is my shop. He has to move what I am working on to do his work, and he often does. He paid no attention to the fact that my wood was not dry and had no previous reason to, since I don’t usually use wood that is so wet. The parts that I carefully stacked with sticks so that they would have air movement on all sides were now just laying down flat on a table. In one night all of the parts developed an amazing cup because the sides exposed to the air were drying and the sides on the table were not. This all happened in one night. And since my brother usually works late, it was a short night at that. I was able to get the lumber back to flat by soaking the side that was up and drying the side that was down. All ended fine, but this created a lot of extra work and a lot of extra consternation on my part. And, I thought I worried about wood movement before.
This is an extreme example of wood movement, but the lessons learned apply even to dry wood. Make sure that pieces that need to stay flat have air movement on all sides, especially before the project is assembled. And try to hustle. If you take the time to make flat pieces, get them assembled before they can move. Remember, things can literally go bad overnight.
For fun here is the table the was moving on me. I had to go back twice to trim the breadboard ends flush as the boards shrunk, even after I left them 1/4″ short on each end to allow for some of the shrinkage.
The top on this table shrunk more than 1″ in width as it dried.
What’s Going on at WunderWoods
Everyone always asks what I do. Here's the answer. Click on the photo above for a short video tour and see all of the steps it takes to go from a tree to finished furniture.