Oak sleepers as skirting?

[cjard]

There's quite an impressive price difference between oak skirting, and chunks of freshly sawn oak. For the amount I need (around 500 linear metres), it seems it'd be worth buying the necessary equipment to rip e.g. A 2600x200x100 sleeper up into strips but my only concern is how the wood would behave afterwards. What level of warping could I look forward to? Is French oak any different from English oak? Would being fixed to a wall encourage the timber to stay relatively straight? I'm not bothered about it being true as a die, nothing else about the building is, and I'm not wanting any fancy ogee etc, so just a simple rip and planed two sides would likely suffice

I already have a large table saw but I'm thinking that a big bandsaw and a conveyor table might be he better tool for the job, even if the rip is a little rougher?

 

[Chud]

I think this would be a labour of love (in other words more trouble than it's worth) - if you can get air dried or kiln dried stock that would be better.

Matthew Cremona (based in the US) has a good youtube channel where the majority of his work is tree -> finished product; he fells/collects trees, mills them, air dries them and finally makes stuff with them. He shows how to do each stage in reasonable detail.

I think you need to air dry for ~6 months to a year and iirc you shouldn't plane to size to far in advance of fitting. The other thing to bear in mind is that many of these sleepers that are sold cheap have at least one live/waney edge which is obviously going to increase your waste by quite a lot!

 

[bernardgreen]

Reclaimed railway sleepers can have the remains of nails and other metal fixings in the timber. The tops will have been snapped off or rusted away leaving no obvious sign that there is metal in the timber. These bits of metal can wreck the blades of cutting and planing tools

 

[big-all]

you cant do it on a table saw with guards in place as the cutting capacity will be less than the wood thickness so the wood will not fit under the blade guard
if it does the wood will stop at the riving knife
if your table has a separate guard and riving knife you need to make sure the cutting capacity is greater than half the thickness
you also need a smoothish virtually flat surface to run on the fence to stop binding up

 

[geraldthehamster]

You can get 2400x200x50 "half sleepers", but 50mm is still probably twice the thickness you're after.

Cheers
Richard

 

[big-all]

other points to note

skirting is made from joinery quality timber
sleepers are made from a fairly low quality as twists warps splits cups are off little importance
if you want extremely rustic a rough sawn finish with possible twists warps splits cups and a joint or 2 on most walls then its worth thinking about

 

[foxhole]

Reclaimed railway sleepers can have the remains of nails and other metal fixings in the timber. The tops will have been snapped off or rusted away leaving no obvious sign that there is metal in the timber. These bits of metal can wreck the blades of cutting and planing tools

Would have to be new sleepers .

 

[motorbiking]

No real difference between French and English Oak from a species point of view. main difference is going to be wet vs dry, warping of solid wood and the contaminants in the wood.

The difference in price is because one is kiln dried, planed wood and the other is green oak. drying doubles the price and planing the same again on top.

You could probably get green oak for the same money as sleepers, but it will shrink and warp badly. Unless that is the look you want.

 

[cjard]

My table saw will do a cut depth of just over 120mm, and I can borrow a petrol driven one that'll do 250.. But I was definitely looking at it as a band saw job, using new sleepers. I've got 3 phase, which does open up more possibilities for buying big toys to feed my fingers into.

If I was doing 220x100 on my saw I'd look to rip em into 10 boards of 18 or so, keeping the 100 as the height of the finished board. Could be a lot of work pushing something that chunky through a relatively wide blade, of course..

In terms of shrink and warp, am I looking at a 2600 length that will twist through e.g. 90 degrees along it's length, or is that extreme? Would I be better off cutting and stacking them with battens between and leaving them to air dry, or fixing to a wall (I.e. In place) - would fixing keep them somewhere near well behaved?

 

[big-all]

what ever you do you will have rough sawn timber that needs planeing/machining to smooth or shape
they will need cutting then stacking for around a year undercover but un heated
then you select the boards you can use and machine them to shape and size

 

[Deleted member 174758]

2800mm is simply too short to my mind. We generally get delivered oak skirting is random lengths up to about 6.5 metres long and even for domestics you need lengths of around 4 metres to do room wall in a "oner" (the preferable approach)

 

[Gerrydelasel]

In twenty years time we're going to be looking at all this fashionable, pale oak moulding and thinking "Urg, how dated. Let's paint it".

 

[chappers]

If you are using green oak then you really need to be ripping it to 2" board and seasoning before finishing to your size.
Personally sounds like too much hassle