January 25, 20179 yr Good Evening Friends, When you are about to start a new piece to build and you have a choice between Cherry or Quarter Sawn White Oak and the piece you are going to make will set in your new remodeled man cave. Which would you prefer? Edited December 8, 20178 yr by Ron Dudelston tags added
January 25, 20179 yr I like cherry... way more character and richness... besides everybody else wants oak.. and you can use poplar for a poor man's cherry...
January 25, 20179 yr Anything but oak. I like oak the least of all woods I have worked with. The reason, I use to have a refinish repair shop and the biggest percentage was oak. From all the old furniture I worked on,none of the other species of wood ever had the long weather cracks as oak . Dressers, chest of drawers sometimes had cracks the width of the entire top. This is the one thing that might or might not reappear again no matter how you went about repairing it. Replacing the piece with new was the only guarantee it didn't come back later and eat you alive... It finally got to where as the new customer was explaining what they had and what they want me to do, as soon as they mentioned oak, I immediately doubled the price. New oak, when you refinish anything you are usually working on very old wood so I never had the chance to compare.... And it would be hard to find any new oak in my shop because of many years ago working with it....
January 26, 20179 yr I have always been enamored with the Craftsman/Arts & Crafts style so I prefer using oak for most of my home furniture projects.
January 26, 20179 yr Given the choice I would choose Cherry. Given an alternative I would choose Walnut.
January 26, 20179 yr 25 minutes ago, Grandpadave52 said: Tough decision... I guess I would go with the Quarter Sawn Cherry... leave it up to Gramps,,, 32 minutes ago, John Moody said: Given an alternative I would choose Hickory...
January 26, 20179 yr It depends on what piece you are going to build perhaps. QSWO has some beautiful grain to it and its hard to resist the ray fleck pattern and if your finish the piece right you can give it a really deep 3D appearance. Cherry of course can finish beautifully and it works very easily. Where some would see the photo reactivity in cherry as a down side most feel that it ads a nice patina over time. Perhaps if you knew what the project was and how many board foot it would require you could do a side by side comparison. QWSO is usually very stable so if you keep it in a controlled, stable environment it should last years and years. If it might be subject to some wear and tear I would lean toward QWSO over cherry because cherry is much softer and will dent and scratch easily. I built my dining room table out of cherry and it is starting to show some "beauty" marks after only 5 years of in frequent use. I know if I'd had QWSO it would have shrugged off most of the dings the cherry now shows.
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