Dan Padova posted:TN posted:Most of the lumber we buy for train table's would be designated SPF, avoid the F - fir douglass and white fir doug fir is strong but brittle, white fir will twist and turn and is useless for layout building.
P - pine southern yellow pine is junk for our purposes it's mostly used for trusses and treated lumber. White pine is great it's what we use for stair stock and thats why its so expensive.
S - spruce is good stuff soft strong and stays true. Buy your lumber at a lumber yard that pros use.
Lumber is the same as its always been........... just need to know what to buy.
I beg to differ. The lumber sold today and for quite some time now, is basically "farmed" lumber. Seedlings are planted, then harvested twenty, thirty or more years in the future. These trees are fast growing, meaning the sap wood takes up more of the volume in a piece of lumber.
Old growth lumber, on the other hand, has much less sap wood. The growth rings are so close to each other it's hard to count them. In my career as a carpenter, working on historic restoration projects, i have been able to salvage alot of the boards that came out of these buildings. What a pleasure to work with. And it was all straight.
I'm sure you're correct... on the same line a few years ago I remodeled my parents home and hung new interior "birch veneer" doors with what appeared to be standard clear pine (not finger jointed) frames.
I've NEVER in my life seen such hard wood as the frames. It was like nailing oak - just about every finishing nail I put in them bent. Later I read that some "soft' wood was imported South American species. This stuff was like nailing through steel. 
(and yes I know that the quality of today's imported steel nails is lousy compared to domestically produced ones in the days of yore).
