MAR-K's bed wood:
Southern Yellow Pine or
Appalachian Red Oak.
Not to give y'all a hard time, as I plan to buy come custom punched stainless steel strips form you soon. But I am a wood worker of sorts, and had to comment on your choice of red oak for bed wood.
Red oak is not very rot resistant at all, perhaps the least rot resistant of all the oak choices. Sure, it looks fine, and most people will take care of their truck, even park it in a garage, but for those who have a working truck that is left outside, and those who don't worry about messing up the finish on the bed wood, if you even finish it to start with, red oak is a bad choice, if it gets wet and holds moisture, it will rot more quickly then you may think.
This has some good info:
http://www.ahec.org/hardwoods/guide/oakred.htmlAnd the important part:
"Durability, Rated slightly to non-resistant to heartwood decay"
A much better choice of oak would be white oak:
http://www.ahec.org/hardwoods/guide/oakwhite.htmlAnd the important part:
"Durability, The heartwood is resistant to decay"
I will be using white oak for my bed wood.
Many people may not know there are even more than one choice of oak, and those who do may not know the different property's.
We do a fair amount of timber framing (sometimes called post and beam construction) knowing the different quality's of woods available helps to know what to use them for for the best performance.
For example, red oak would be fine for girts and rafters, but bad for post because of moisture at the ground, and the tendency to rot, so we use white oak for post, and rot is less of concern.
I think the very same applies to bed wood, why use a wood prone to rot when there are better choices with essentially the same look?
Grigg
