It’s Roy here! I have been saving up this account under my nickname ‘Bowser’ for quite some time, and thought that I might just use it to send you chaps a postcard. I am having a great holiday at Surfermag.com, where the skies are sunny and everyone is surprisingly civilized.
I have just scored a bunch of Poplar which was grown on the property here and dried for about four years. It is very stable, light timber with an even grain, and I am making an 8’1" x 21" pintail with some of it.
The Poplar we use in the Southeast USA is actually quite heavy (if compared to Balsa).It is great all around woodworking lumber.I have a stash of poplar that is “spalted”.It had a fungus many years ago that makes the grain look like it has black ink lines in it.It is so cool I just look at it. RB
My brother, the artist, has some custom made frame and panel doors in his house that have big spalted poplar panels. They are very beautiful indeed. Here on the west coast, poplar has replaced pine over the years, as the wood of choice for paint grade, solid stock for cabinets. Poplar & Alder get used a lot for these uses here. I have made some “paint grade” cabinets from Poplar that people just couldn’t paint because they liked the look too much.
My take is that it’s an unstable wood for some things due to its great amount of movement, so I’m not convinced that it wood be a good choice for solid surfboards. I’d be curious to here what Roy has to say about Poplar’s stability in large, expansive blanks.
I assumed that this Poplar is stable because it shows no sign of twisting, cupping, or any other warping. Actually timber stability is nice but doesn’t seem to be vital in a strip planked hollow blank (The Monterey Pine which I sometimes use moves quite a bit under normal conditions but has proven to be good when strip planked even on a board which filled with water) . Perhaps stability is more important in a solid blank? Poplar isn’t all that common over here as a timber because it has mainly been planted for shelter belts, but it is milled sometimes.
Thanks for the info about ‘spalting’. I have a few sticks with some black/grey lines in them. I was wondering if they were still ok! Regarding weight, the trees that produced the timber which I have were grown under very moist, fertile and sheltered conditions, and they are now huge for twelve year old trees. Growing fast like that makes the timber lighter (we can grow Balsa over here but it grows so slowly that, so I have heard, the timber is as heavy as mahogany) , and also it has been drying for four years or so. My sticks are a little heavier than Redwood but lighter than Monterey Pine, but the timber seems to be much stronger than Redwood so I am using slightly smaller dimensions in deck and bottom planking. What impressed me is the very even density, most of our fast growing timbers have distinct hard ridges and soft bits in between making it tricky to work with but this stuff is really nice.
I had better remember that I am not supposed to be here ( just visiting)