Posted by Mark Bronkalla on March 05, 2003 at 12:03:05:
In Reply to: Re: Texas live oak posted by ken on March 04, 2003 at 13:56:29:
No experience with Live Oak, but do want to caution on over-specifying lumber.
For my boat (and most furniture), I buy #1Common grade lumber. This allows some knots. The stock will normally be flat sawn. The advantage (aside from low cost), that when looking at a given pice of wood you will have areas that are very straight grained along 1 edge (nice for battens, chines and shears) and much of the rest will have some degree of curvature to the grain. When making your frame peices this manes that you can very often align the grain with the shape of the frame member and actually have a stronger resultant piece than if you had used "straght grained wood".
Given that most of the frame pieces are relatively short you can also easily work around the knots without too much going onto the scrap pile or into the fireplace.
Here are a couple of links about live oak (besides the US FPL info):http://www.seacoastonline.com/2002news/06282002/col_wate/11547.htm,http://www.ucfpl.ucop.edu/ER_BU/SOD_PR1.HTM which aslo covers some of the issues regarding trees harvested suffering from oak wilt.