A friend is having a front door made by a joiner. He is going to use Canadian Hemlock wood. He said pine was no good (quite), and that oak is inclined to split, warp and shatter.
Anybody have anything to add?
www.craftsman-style.info/finishing/079-hemlock.htm
"A wood which is quite extensively used for exterior construction. It is a coarse, rough, soft wood with open grain. When well seasoned it is light in weight and in color. It warps badly and splits. A pile of it in the hot sun will literally crawl all over the lot. The western hemlock is better as a rule than the eastern and middle-west product.
This wood is not as easy to paint well as some others. It absorbs the paint unevenly in spots and the paint upon it dries slowly. The paint must be well brushed into the wood to gain good anchorage. Hemlock is not used for interior trim lumber"
The door is in County Durham, about 1000 feet up, so gets some of the worst of English weather (awaits cries from Lancastrians).
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Hemlock will be fine, it's as hard as hell, and has a good knot-free straight grain. It's a good material. Others could be Meranti, Douglas Fir (Columbian Pine), etc. More "exotic" may be rather expensive!
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Best front door I've ever seen belonged to a propa joiner here in Cornwall and was Brazilian Mahogany,
which was just oiled, not painted or stained or varnished.
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The best option is to use Idigbo. Light. Strong. Hard. Stable. The timber of choice.
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We've built some stables out of some vile African red wood. It's insanely dense; in fact, we had to buy a table saw to cut it because it just blunted the blade of the circular saw.
Looks beautiful when it's in, but the cut edges gave vicious splinters. You wouldn't kick through one of those walls in a hurry, which is presumably why it's used for stables!
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Get yourself a nice plastic one, white, mahogany or oak (effect)
:-)
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Hemlock wood? - FotheringtonTomas
