How We Built a DIY Wood-Fired Hot Tub from Cedar - Step 2 Cutting the Staves

In our previous video we went through our process of finding high quality cedar wood at very affordable prices. Now it’s time to turn that wood into staves (narrow wood panels like the side of a barrel) for building the sides of our tub.


We found that cutting wood staves took a lot of creativity for us because we want to reuse as much full­-width excess wood as possible for other projects like stairs, benches or handrails. Simply ripping each board in half to pull out the staves would waste a lot of wood.

To get the maximum yield from our cedar wood, we inspected each board carefully and isolated where the good stave wood was for each board. Next, we varied between cutting boards with a cross saw or ripping them in half, depending on where the quality wood was located on each board. This is a slower, more deliberate process then just going to town with the chop saw, but the amount of quality wood we were able to salvage for other projects is well worth the slower pace. Watch this video see the process we went through to make each cut to maximize our wood!