perchin said:
I own a full shop of tools. I buy all my lumber rough, then do all the kilning myself. I then mill it all to my needs. (against the wifes wishes)
I love resawing lumber. Past few weeks dad and I've been resawing well over 1000 board feet of lumber for a couple applications.
In our basement room, we pulled down the existing suspended ceiling, and wanted to replace it with a rustic barn wood look, but we didn't want to pay for the actual barnwood (at least in this area, it fetches an extremely high price). A good solution was the pallets that sheet metal comes on. They range from 4x8 up to 5x12 feet, and have 2x3-3x4 inch beams running lengthwise, with 3/4-5/4 slats on top, spaced about a foot apart. Some of the slats will be standard 5/4 pine deck boards (and thereby useless for this purpose), but a good many are rough sawn white oak and poplar, with some rough sawn pine mixed in. The beams, with exception to a few, are white oak, red oak, and poplar, all rough sawn.
I usually have a few of these pallets every month from aluminum I use, then we ended up getting as many as needed for free from a local metal stamping/CNC cutting (mass quantities only) shop. We left them outside for a few months, to weather, and get the "barn wood" appearance, then started milling them.
What we've been doing is running all the slats through the planer (one side only, to leave an untouched rough side), down to 3/4 inch, then bandsawing the beams down to 3/4 as well, taking just the rough outsides (the middles are in a stack waiting to be planed into flooring, as we have a few closets in need of new floors). We cut them down to 3 - 5 foot lengths, and stuck them up to the ceiling.
Granted, being pallet wood, it generally isn't the top quality lumber, but for the price we paid, we have no problem having to throw away a few pieces here and there that aren't up to par, and have no issues cutting knots out here and there. Plus, the unevenness adds to the barnwood appearance. It does look real nice up on the ceiling.