TN posted: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.
That's a common misconception very little if any farmed lumber is used for framing. Most of the farmed wood is turned into paper products , panels like mdf,osb and engineered beams.......etc . There is a big difference between farmed lumber and managed forest products. Most farmed lumber is grown in warmer climates for a longer growing season using weedy species.
Lumber yards stock Canadian and Northwestern US managed forest products and of course there's Menards who started out as lumber yard and know what they're doing plus I can load up my trucks and not a cart.
Tom N
I stand partially corrected. The terminology can be misleading. I used "farmed" instead of "managed". I guess I didn't see the difference.
