Taming the Wild Pine

When I first got serious about woodworking after college, I remember reading a dire warning in a woodworking book about working with pine:

“If you work with pine, be sure to purchase your material, mill it, cut it and assemble the entire project all in a single day. If you let pine sit overnight, it will warp and be unusable.”

At the time, the warning flummoxed me. Sure, the pine from our home center tended to cup a bit if left to its own devices. But the pine I’d salvaged from my home’s 100-year-old floor was the most righteous and stable stuff I’d ever laid hands on.

Since those early days, I have had lots of experience with pine. Thousands of board feet of all sorts of species have passed under my hands: yellow pine, sugar pine, some wacky junk from Sweden, and (this week) Eastern white pine.

All of the species have their charms. The yellow pine is tough like maple but is difficult to saw. The sugar pine is lightweight and stable but splintery. The Swedish stuff reminds me of some exchange students at my high school. And the Eastern white pine cuts and planes beautifully.

Here’s the truth: What I have found is that pine is stable when it’s properly dried and at equilibrium with its environment. Pine’s bad rap comes from the fact that it’s usually sold a little wet at the lumberyard. As it dries, it moves. Also, I’ve found that construction-grade pine is prone to suffer from drying defects, such as case-hardening, which also besmirches its name.

The hard data from the U.S. Forestry Service backs all this up. The government’s “dimensional change coefficient” figures for hardwoods and softwoods predict how much a species will move when the humidity changes.

Most of the pines are more stable than typical domestic hardwoods. Eastern white pine and sugar pine, for example, move less in service than all the typical domestic hardwoods: maple, cherry, oak, walnut, alder, beech, birch, hickory and ash. And quartersawn Eastern white pine barely moves at all, according to our government. It’s like the MDF of the softwood world. A theoretical 12″-wide quartersawn board would move about .009″ when its moisture content changed by one percentage point. That ain’t much.

The pine in our shop this week is a joy. When we brought it in, the moisture meter readings indicated it was actually a little drier than the rest of the wood in our shop. And so I knew what to do: Cut the stuff to length and let it soak up a bit of moisture. It moved a bit. And now it’s tamed.

– Christopher Schwarz

When pine goes bad. Here’s a piece of yellow pine that was brought in right from the lumberyard and planed to 3/4″ thick. Overnight, it cupped like this. Of course, this could be a novel way to make a coopered door….

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