Furniture-grade Lumber

good quality lumber is hard to find here as they cut the tree the cut it in to lumber wich they sel as fast as they get buyers ,no drying of prossesed wood here .

before buying it is a good idea to mesure the humidity of the lumber ,testers can be booght at lazada and other online shops ,not expensive .

luaan red is good furniture wood as it is much harder than luaan white ,but i believe the sale of the red to be prohibited ,i know this as at one time there was a goverment cvontrole on wood sellers and suddenly all the red was gone til a few days after the controle ,the sellers knew the controle was comming so they reakted acordingly he (only in the Philippines

best is to buy the wood and build a drying rack for it before using it ,i dryed it 1 yr as i used it to build a boat and could not have wood twisting

greets Dirk

@dirk.c.

What % of moisture content do you want for construction stuff? I have a moisture meter for my smoker woods.

Hi Stef.

Not sure if this will help or if you would build furniture with it.

All our doors and jambs we had manufactured, 900mm to 1M x 7 and 2 sets of French doors 1.2M are all Mahogany, not sure the species but it's heavy and a hardwood, seems to be readily available to the manufacturers.

The timber starts off as a medium brown with nice grains and after sealing with clear lacquer looks the same but after a couple of months goes to a darker and slightly reddish brown, they look good.

Good luck.

Cheers, Steve.

I'd be happy to purchase directly then mill and dry here.  Finding the right vendor is the hard part.  I've spoken with a couple of local door / furniture makers ... they are reluctant to divulge their sources.  (Most of their wood isn't the greatest anyway.)

A friend has a mahogany bench at her beachside kubo.  Three inches thick, 15" wide and easily 25 feet in length -- fabulous.  Her Dad built it sixty years ago.  The mahogany here is wonderful.

I put a couple pieces of narra on the corners of the kitchen peninsula -- another nice local hardwood.  (Definitely hard!  With an odd smell.)

Stef

PS -- Finished the pantry yesterday!