Shopsmith Forums

I don't believe that I had posted this...
As antique tractor show fans my son and I attend a number of shows each year. Several of them hold consignment auctions as fund raisers and we love those. Always plenty of good bargains. The auctions have tractor stuff but also a wide variety of about everything else you could imagine. About mid June we went to one in Johnson County IN. They sold a good bit of rough-sawn lumber that was lumber they had sawed during sawmill demonstrations the year before and had stored for the year in one of their buildings.

Picture #1.
Some of the oak lumber I bought at a tractor show auction 6/17/17. There are a couple of black walnut boards in this stack. Length runs from 8' to 15'. I only have $30 in all of the oak and walnut in pictures 1 and 2. Picture #2.
The rest of the oak lumber and a couple more pieces of walnut.
Picture #3. A couple of pallets of pine lumber. There are about 5 walnut boards in this batch. Bought these 2 pallets for $15 for both pallets.
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Great find!

Do you have plans for the lumber yet?

BuckeyeDennis wrote:Do you have plans for the lumber yet?

I do .....

What were the two hobbies again? Buying stuff and?

I wish I had the room to store things like this but sadly I don't, its all used up with other "treasures".

Ed

reible wrote:What were the two hobbies again? Buying stuff and?
Ed

Woodworking and collecting tractors.

Two hobbies? Woodworking and robbery?

Buying wood for that price is almost a crime.

Nice!!

Nothing gets me more excited then a stack of rough cut lumber!!

Well,,,,,, almost nothing.

I knew I had an index card with a board count here somewhere, it was hiding.
A count isn't all that good of a measure since a few are 8' long and a few are almost twice that but the average is maybe about 11'. Most are 1" thick but some are 2". Some are about 5" wide and some are about 9 or 10 inches. I could figure them in board feet but I don't want to...
There are 130 boards total of which 50 are oak, 10 are black walnut and 70 are pine. With a total cost of $45 that comes to just under .35 cents per board... I would love to do that all day long.

I have no idea why this kind of lumber sells so poorly at these old tractor consignment auctions. I suppose a lot of it is that the crowd is all antique tractor guys and that hobby by itself is more than capable of keeping a wallet empty. I would have bought about 4 more pallets of lumber (one was cherry) but I had already stressed my wallet a little at that sale and there were still some items to be sold that I wanted to buy. One of the things I still wanted to buy was some standard scaffolding end panels. You know what they are, about 4' wide and 6' tall. They go together kind of like a giant Erector-set. You can stack them fairly high. I bought 14 panels for a total of $10. I already had about 6 panels but wanted some more. I also have a number of stand-off brackets and stuff like guard rails etc.

OOOOOPPS... I guess I lied about the lumber... I was looking at the sale tickets to see what I paid for the scaffold panels and it seems that I only paid $10 total for those 2 pallets of pine lumber. I don't know why I was thinking $15... Galloping senility I guess.

A quick scaffold story... A good friend of mine that used to do a lot of construction and repair work (and now does restoration millwork on historic structures almost exclusively) owned several sets of scaffolding for some time. One day his father borrowed them for a big job at his house. Well, it seems that the father decided that they needed several more horizontal bars in each panel for placing walk boards and for climbing up the ends. He welded in 4 extra bars across each panel. Not so really bad "except"... what he welded in as bars was not light structural tubing like the frames are made of. Noooo, he used 1" steel rebar. My friend doesn't use them much these days but when he does they are so heavy he can barely handle them... He was not a happy camper.


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BuckeyeDennis wrote:Do you have plans for the lumber yet?

The black walnut will go from the barn to the woodshop along with some of the best oak.
Some of the rest will be used in repairs and upgrades to my 5 barns, 3 of which are timber-frame. I'm being slightly loose with the term barn here. The actual definition of the word barn is more loose than it used to be, at least here in the midwest. The definition varies as you move around the country. Dairy barns, hog barns, tobacco barns, horse barns... One of my timber frames is my farm/mechanics shop.


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