Shopsmith Forums

My neighbor needed some help cleaning up his workshop. When we were moving things around he asked me if I would like some old wood. I said, "sure". Boy was I surprised when he showed me some old oak boards he pulled out of a farm house. The planks are 8 feet long, 1 1/4 inches thick and range for 16-19 inches wide!!!! So I wound up with 8 boards > 16 inches wide and many more 8-10 inches wide. I now feel like I have a lifetime supply of oak.

I have never seen oak planks like this. If any of you guys have, can you help me guess how old they might be? Here are some pics. . .

How old was the farm house? That's a start? The nail spacing seems to be from iron nails and what might be 24 inches on center? Maybe?

jon wrote: I have never seen oak planks like this. If any of you guys have, can you help me guess how old they might be? Here are some pics. . .

Are you sure that is oak? It looks a lot like chestnut in the pictures.

My friend didn't really know. He guessed 20-30 years old??? The nails were square, but my friend thought they might have just been concrete nails, not the old, hand hammered kind.

Well, my friend thought oak because the story he got was the lumber came from the farm on which the house was built. I thought chestnut was extinct due to some fungus or blight. I am not an expert and will defer to you guys.

Can you get a closer picture showing the grain. It looks like chestnut to me also. They use to use whatever trees that were close by when they built buildings. Around here a lot of the old bars ave chestnut beams in them. As far as the oak bords being that wide that is not unusal because when they were sawen they were cut down to a standard size, I have sawn a lot of oak 20 plus inches wide but you had to put a lot of weight on them or they would cup.

If your neighbor can help you find out when the farm was settled, or more specifically when the house was built, you can answer the age question. It should be a matter of record at the county courthouse as to when the house was built. As for the type of wood, if this is really old it could well have been harvested before the blight. Typically oak is so open grained that it is obvious to identify, but there are also many types of oak. I suspect whatever the wood it is (or was) indigenous to the area as typically farm buildings were built with locally sawn wood. Whatever it is, it is a genuine "barn find" and a rare gift to recieve.

jon wrote:Well, my friend thought oak because the story he got was the lumber came from the farm on which the house was built. I thought chestnut was extinct due to some fungus or blight. I am not an expert and will defer to you guys.

Yes a blight wiped out most chestnut trees starting in the early 1900's. Before the blight it is said that 1 in 4 trees in the USA were chestnuts. It is not uncommon for some nice lumber to surface from time to time especially if it is reclaimed as yours is.

A few years ago a grove of old growth trees were discovered in Warm Springs Ga. Some of those trees survived the original blight and are being studied now.

I saw an article in the paper a week or so ago about a group that has been working on raising a blight resistant tree for the past 30 years. They apparently have had some success.

If anyone is making something with an old piece of chestnut I would appreciate one of your scraps. Apparently there were a few wooden clock movements that were made with chestnut plates and I have no idea of what the wood is like. The online photos I have seen have varied widely and it is hard to make a comparison this way.

Troy

I have a chestnut tree growing in a small grove of Norway Spruce trees in my yard. I know that it was not planted there on purpose. It is around 12 to 15 years old and has been producing a small number of chestnuts for several years now but I only realized what it was this fall because the squirrel was carting them off as soon as they hit the ground. I had just assumed that it was some kind of oak.
I have absolutely no idea where the seed came from as I know of no other on the farm or any where in the community.
We beat the squirrel to about a dozen nuts and I am going to bury them around the farm in spots that I will not be spraying and will see what happens.


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