Buying wood or do you "source" it?

Our upcoming stool series uses cherry for the build. You may want to be ready and have it in stock for after we finish the current series building the dining table.

Where do you buy your wood from is a frequently asked, daily question at the workshop. It’s not always an easy question for us Brits being as we used up all of our own natural resources centuries ago building ships to protect the Empire from the tyranny by which the empire was built. We had used up our own supplies of every naturally occurring thing and then shamefully went elsewhere to use up the resources belonging to and being taken care of by others. Then, when plundering was done, we rewarded the mighty warriors with monstrous houses and even castles like this one and enclosed lands with walls, fences and hedges to keep working country people out. What was once common land for common people to work became private land for the privileged. This legalised class robbery denied the commoners a place to live and work with their families and so the workers once living peacefully and in harmony on the no-longer-available common land accumulated in the nearby cities and industrial towns and subsequently prisons and workhouses were filled with people arrested as vagrants. Without a home and job a new resource of free labour was created to further feed the consumerist essentiality of the Industrial Revolution. Under the Vagrancy Act and with returning military personal no longer finding work or a home too, workers became ten a penny. Industrialism of course has always needfully created consumerism and a perfect marriage called economy gave birth to the ever expanding seaways of the earth. Global economy became the need of every country on the globe. Actually, Brits no longer say where do you buy your wood from, as they did when I left the UK to live in the USA in 1987. They say where do you “source” your wood from. So, where do I source my wood from?

In the UK we have a strange system where importers parcel up smaller bundles of wood into a certain size and they then supply other smaller companies called distributors dotted about in regions who need their cut and that raises the price. Within that system there are other smaller companies willing to sell small amounts and it’s here that we Brits at least can end up paying £6 per board foot for common American red oak. In the scheme of things it may not be cost prohibitive when making our own pieces, but to sell on our work it can mean our prices are too high for our customers.

You the consumer then get parcelled off to one of those distributors usually depending on the size of your order. Well, that was until the internet and global distribution came along. Now it is actually much easier than it was before because you can buy directly from smaller importers like I do or indeed you can buy via eBay too , which I do from time to time successfully also. Some small suppliers are growing businesses by buying hardwoods from mainland Europe. Currently I stock oak from Poland and France and then I have walnut, ash, cherry, elm, beech and sycamore too. All originating in Europe. I don’t stock too much, enough fro the coming year or two. The company I buy from in Thirsk in Yorkshire is called Scawton Saw Mill, www.scawtonsawmill.co.uk (telephone number 01845 597733) and they will ship a single board or a cubic metre or two anywhere in the country, but they work with a shipper and have wood delivered in three to four days.