Reasons for the relative costs of oak?

[opener]

I've been puzzling over this since I changed the material for my current job from kilned oak to air-dried as mentioned in a previous thread (garage doors).

I buy kilned oak as square edged which is fairly easy to convert to the sizes required.
Air-dried comes in large waney edged boards which take a lot of time and effort to cut up.

Say that 1" kd sq edged oak costs £1000 and you allow for 40% wastage = £1400 cu m
Say that 1" ad waney edged oak costs £900 and you allow for 100% wastage = £1800 m

So air-dried costs £400 per cube more than kilned plus hours of extra labour although you do get a large pile of very expensive firewood.

There is also a similar price ratio between KILNED square edged and KILNED waney edged so why would anyone choose the waney edged???

As for AIR-DRIED there was no choice - only waney edged available.

Can anyone enlighten me / add their comments

Cheers
Malcolm

[Keith]

Hi Malcom,

I'm finding hard to follow your figures, but then I've had a hard day ;D

Waney board approx £25/cubic ft; 50% wastage; bottom line £50 per cubic ft

Sawn approx £40/ cubic ft; 20% wastage; bottom line again about £50 per cubic ft

PAR costs about £60/cubic ft and you should have little wastage

Prices are variable and of course wastage, especially with waney edge boards, is the luck of the draw. I haven't bought any waney for a couple of years, it isn't generally worth the trouble.

Hope this helps

Keith

[dom]

Air dried timber can never attain the lower moisture content of Kiln dried and so is not as stable, the sawyer has to keep this in stick for anything between 5 to 10 years, possibly a reason for the high cost.
In my experience WE often yields a better choice of figuring.
But in todays high speed world Kiln dried is the best bet.
It will be 7 or 8 percent drier than air dried when you receive it(assuming it's been stored correctly) allowing you to use it and not have to store it for so long.

[opener]

The reason for my anguish is that I priced this job (garage doors) in kilned square edged oak adding 50% to the cutting list cost for wastage.
I then realised with help from this forum that I should use air-dried oak because of the doors situation. The air-dried oak was slightly cheaper (9/10ths) but only available in waney-edged boards, the wastage from which is huge. And it's taken a great deal of time and sweat to rip out the heartwood and the waney edges.
I haven't bought waney-edged boards in years either so it came as a bit of a shock. The 3" was fun too, 3no x 3m x 22" (I work on my own)
I've accepted it as one of life's and business' lessons and I do have a large enough pile of small to medium offcuts to build myself a new kitchen although I wasn't planning on doing one just yet.
The prices I quoted were from Hewins in Somerset and the wastage percentages were also theirs, although I didn't buy from there. The price I got though was similar and I was told that the boards had been part kilned to ensure around 15% mc.
It always seems to me that kilned oak is the better product simply because of the fine items that can be made from it whereas items made from air-dried tend towards the rustic, therefore I find it odd that AD is effectively much more expensive and can only agree with Dom that it must be all the time sat in the yard drying.
Anyway thanks for reading and replying
Cheers
Malcolm