I’ve been doing some spring cleaning. Yesterday and today I’ve been hauling pine seat blanks into the attic from where they’ve been air-drying outside. Before that, I was going through more seats upstairs, making room. The upshot is that I have found some surplus seats. They are surplus for various reasons. The white pine is either surplus because it has cracks (I’m selling it cheap for glue-ups) or because I found a pile of nice seats that I sent with Seth to the Handworks show in Iowa. Some of these seats came back, so I figure I might as well throw them in here. The rest of the seats are surplus because they are of a species that I am no longer interested in making seats out of. I’ve gotten lazy in my old age and don’t want to mess with anything but white pine and butternut. So I’m posting them here. (Some of it is long enough to make table tops if you’re so inclined.)
Please Note: I really don’t want to ship these seats. This is for a couple reasons. I don’t know how to grade these things. Plus I live in humid NC and, while the seats have all been air-dried for several years, they are still somewhere between 10 and 20% EMC. I don’t know what they’ll do if I ship them to the desert. All told, there’s too much room for disappointment. But if I can’t sell them otherwise, I might be willing to ship some of them without a warranty. It makes my nervous, but I need them out of here and they’re too good to burn.
With that in mind, here they are:
Buckeye: These are the widest seats I’ve ever had. The one in the photo is 27 to 29″ wide and well over 2″ thick. It may be close to 2.5″ The ones that I have carved had some curl – pretty, but tough. They also grew with a twist, which means they are more likely to twist. These broads are six or eight years old and still pretty flat, but that can still change. I have three boards, 5-6′ long. $4/bf
A stack of nice white pine seats. Came from Michigan. $70/seat (I definitely will not ship these, but these folks do)
White pine for two-piece seats: I have enough of this for maybe 10 or 15 seats. $3/bf
Elm: This stuff is very hard. It’s also rather pretty, in a greenish sort of way. Like all elm, it has interlocking grain, which makes it impossible to split (a benefit for seats), very hard to carve, and very likely to twist. Most English Windsor chair seats were made out of this stuff. I have a half dozen boards of varying widths up to 22″ or so. They’re maybe 6′ long. $5/bf
Walnut: This is mostly some stuff that I had sawn eight or ten years ago. It’s really nice walnut, air-dried with lots of color. Most of it is pretty clear. Some of it is 8′ long or so. $120/seat (this one has a couple cracks, so it’s $80)