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Buying rough sawn boards
We offer rough sawn oak, cedar, ash and elm in all manner of shapes, sizes and grades. Our job is to make it easy for you to find the right wood for your project. We do that by encouraging you to come and select your own boards with the help and guidance of our team. All we ask is that you make an appointment before coming to see us.
We cut all of our oak from logs in our Wiltshire sawmill. We carefully dry it, kiln it and then grade it. This can take anything from a year to four years for thick oak boards. It’s no exaggeration to say that we get to know our oak boards quite well. While oak is our most popular timber, we also process Cedar of Lebanon, British grown elm and ash as well as sycamore and sweet chestnut.
Our logs are cut into a range of board thicknesses from 20mm up to 150mm. We offer prime oak boards as well as pippy, brown and character grade oak planks. For external work, we have air dried oak stocks and for internal jobs, we have plenty of well-kilned oak and a selection of semi-seasoned timber.
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Sawn timber choices
We have a great selection of sawn boards to show you. We have oak boards with no knots and boards with lots of knots. Or, how about brown oak with its chocolate streaks or pippy oak boards that include the appropriately named ‘cats paws’?
We also offer oak boards with varying levels of character from the odd small knot to full on rustic.
Call us to discuss your project
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Grading of sawn oak
During the cutting process, we divide our oak into a number of grades according to colour, knot content, and general presentation. Our grades are broadly based on the Forestry Commission document ‘Making the Grade. A guide to appearance grading UK grown hardwood timber’.
If you’re used to French grade descriptions, this table will help you make comparisons with our grade descriptions.
| Vastern Timber Grade | Making the Grade | French equivalent |
| Prime | 1A | Q-B A |
| First | 1B | Q-B 1 |
| Character | 2 / 3 | Q-B 2 / 3 (4) |
| Pippy | Pippy | Pippy |
| Heavy pippy / burr | Burr | Burr |
| Brown | Brown | Rouge |
Oak cut to size
Looking for cut-to-size oak? We can help you with that as well. We have a mill filled with big saws that can handle all shapes and sizes. For some oak cutting lists we can also offer planing and profiling.
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