Q: We received some red oak lumber and a few pieces are blue in the sapwood. Is this mold fungal stain?

Q: In our dimension mill for the center panels on doors, we present the inspector with staves which are 8 feet to 14 feet wide. The inspector marks the unacceptable knots, cracks and other defects with a UV "pen." The staves are passed to a saw operator who (using an UV lamp for ID) cuts out the defective areas and creates shorter staves for subsequent processing (along with some amount of scrap). We then glue-up these staves into a panel downstream in the manufacturing process. In a different plant we use the "glued-up stock" and make a panel for a door. When we stain the doors (or our customers stain the doors), we often find cracks that were missed. In the short term, I'd like to optimize the lighting in the stave and panel inspection area. Can you recommend a reference that would suggest inspection lighting alternatives (ambient lighting, alternative light sources, etc.) that could be evaluated? In the longer term, I'd like to consider some type of a more automated process for crack/check identification. This process would have to be quick and non-invasive to the wood. Have you ever seen this done in your travels?

Q: We are seeing differences in the way that yellow birch and white birch finish; that is, they do not look the same after finishing. Can you shed some light on this?

I generally consider myself an optimist. But I can also be a curmudgeonly cynic especially when it comes to conflicts between small business and government regulation. And then when talk turns to the current economic situation, I guess I’m a little of both the optimist and the cynic.

The office and contract furniture segment of the industry may be the most closely measured. And one close observer of that segment is optimistic about 2011.“After a disastrous 2009, the industry began a modest recovery in late spring of 2010 but the improvements are led by gains in the health care and higher education markets,” Mike Dunlap of Michael A. Dunlap & Associates, LLC told CabinetMakerFDM recently.