Yes, that shit is warped and has knots in it. Yes, if you want the shit that doesn’t have warping and knots, you do indeed have to pay more money.
This is how all commodities, products, and services have worked, since the first time someone had the idea of trading one resource for another resource.
Please try to wrap your head around the concept. Better things cost more. This should NOT be blowing anyone’s fucking mind.
Buying lumber has always been a lottery unless you plan on spending a fortune on really good reliable hardwood lumber. I was never able to afford that.
So I worked like every rough carpenter I learned from you use everything you can get your hands on and use your skill, experience and imagination to make it work. If I start with a load of lumber, I’ll separate everything between good, bad and terrible piles. Terrible stuff gets immediately hacked to small support pieces, bad stuff is hidden in places where imperfections won’t be noticed and the good stuff gets placed in critical locations where obvious flats and straight surfaces are needed. Anything bad or terrible also becomes temporary supports or scaffolding, then for me, it gets chopped into small pieces and burned for camping or used for warmth in the winter … good dried lumber is excellent fire starter or a fuel for fast burning to warm up a cold or frozen cottage.
Buying lumber has always been a lottery unless you plan on spending a fortune
See, this is what I’m saying.
We’ve already got at least one person in these comments, though, who absolutely insists that it used to be different, somehow. I don’t need to be an old timer to know that it simply couldn’t ever have been any other way, apart from the way it is now.
Cheap things will always be worse than more expensive things and trees have always had knots and wavy bits in them. Nobody can change either of those facts, therefore there was NEVER ANY MYSTICAL GOOD OLD TIME, WHEN CHEAP LUMBER WAS AWESOME.
It’s just that these older motherfuckers were having a good time in their lives, getting good money for entry-level jobs, getting the kind of sex that you got when abortion and the pill had just become legalized, paying $22.50 for your mortgage payment, etc.
When shit was that good for your ass, do you really think you were going to remember those times that you had to deal with a warped board? One that cost 24 cents or whatever the fuck?
On the other hand, when those same old guys have crippling back problems that they can no longer get opioid painkillers for, they’re paying 2024 prices for their blood pressure medication and their cholesterol medication, and they haven’t gotten so much as a handjob since 2003…well NOW they’re going to notice and remember when a board is fucked up.
That’s the phenomenon at work, when these old guys insist that hardware store lumber used to be great shit.
What’s so hard about the concept that things may have worsened over time? Worse lumber doesn’t mean the worst lumber.
What’s so hard about the concept that things may have worsened over time?
The fact that trees change their characteristics over hundreds/thousands/millions of years, not a few decades. Lumber has not gotten worse. People’s memories are just faulty.
There’s a difference between old growth trees and farmed trees. The rings are larger. The wood is slightly less dense.
Humans have an impact via selective breeding focused on speed of growth. So yes, it changes over decades.
What defines different grades of lumber can easily change and if you’re paying attention to the world, it’d be hard to imagine that not happening
Changing the fine print about lumber grades could cause changes in the middle grades of lumber. That’s absolutely a thing.
You could easily notice a change in what is considered almost-the-most-premium versus middle-of-the-road lumber.
But the top and the bottom aren’t going to change. They CAN’T change. It’s physically and logically impossible for them to change. The highest price will always get you the actual straight, consistent, knot-free pieces. The lowest grade will always be filled with warped wood and knots.
I’m simply not wrong about this. Good money = good shit. Cheap prices = worst quality. These concepts are not up for debate. They are simply facts.
As a counterpoint I introduce monster cables.
Ridiculously expensive with no appreciable gain in quality.
Prices are subjective and you could easily sell someone lesser quality for a higher price.
People scam people all the time.
So no, good money does not equal quality.
Your concepts are up for debate.
I’ll concede that the principle isn’t 100 percent infallible. And certainly, people are always trying to scam buyers into thinking they’re getting a premium product, when they’re really not. But we’re really not even talking about the top end of the lumber situation, are we?
We’re talking about old-timers fantasizing about some mythical time when the cheapest possible lumber was somehow not the worst lumber. That DEFINITELY never happened. There was never a time when people were randomly selling perfect boards at the cheap lumber price. There’s no incentive to do that. Maybe as, like, a loss-leader item, in some kind of specific promotional situation, maybe. But then you’d know that’s what was happening. Like, the store is trying to get you to come in for great wood, and hopefully you’ll buy a saw or a drill.
Again, that’s not what people are talking about, when they go on rants about hardware store wood. They’re either surprised-Pikachu mode because cheap lumber is shitty, or they think they can remember some time in the dinosaur era, when cheap lumber was generally good. Truly, for the last time, THAT WAS NEVER A THING.
I believe you that cheap lumber has always been bad.
The top and the bottom aren’t going to change. They CAN’T change. It’s physically and logically impossible for them to change.
I live in BC where forestry is a big part of the economy. As i understands it, there is a big difference in log quality between old growth fiber and second growth fiber. It’s because old growth trees grew in forests and second growth trees grew in fields (initially).
Trees grow towards light. Forests are shady so trees grow slowly and pretty much straight up. Fields are bright so light is everywhere and trees grow quickly in every direction. Therefore old growth trees have fewer knots, and tighter, straighter grain where second growth has more knots, and fat rings with more twist.
Also because of improved distribution infrastructure the cost of shipping crappy wood to a market where people don’t know any better has gone down. Also if you live in an area with historically good wood supply, it’s also easier for the good stuff to be sold into other markets too.
Also, because everybody tried to build a new deck at the same time (during the pandemic) quality control may be more lax now because they know it will sell anyway.
Here is a quick visual comparison between old growth and second growth forests. The video more from an ecological perspective but it gives a good view of the difference between an old growth forest and a replanted forest.
There are a lot of differences between old growth and new growth wood that could at least partially account for your colleagues’ opinion.
Another thing that’s potentially changed is who they’re buying their wood from. Buying it from an orange hardware store vs from an actual building supplies store could make a big difference.
That’s unironically fascinating. I’ll have to re-read all of this in more detail, when I have time later.
This level of detail, of course, is the exact opposite of the people I was talking about in the meme, and in this discussion. You wrote like seven paragraphs of interesting, cogent, logical shit. The people I’m talking about? They just say shit like “BACK IN MY DAY, WE HAD REAL LUMBER AND IT WASN’T WARPED. I BLAME THE DIET SODAS AND THE HIP-HOP MUSIC.”
Binary thinking isn’t worth arguing with because it’s simply too stupid to be
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Good money = good shit.
High prices =/= good. Low prices =/= bad. High grade lumber will tend to be more expensive, but assuming that something is better because it’s more expensive is a great way to get conned.
Are you so sure?
Of course every bunk has duds but more lumber is younger now. Younger lumber is less stable.
Ever taken apart an old structure? The ring count is very impressive compared to new stuff
Old structures weren’t built with the cheapest possible lumber. The ones that were? They, uhhhh, they fell apart before they got to be old structures. This is called survivorship bias.
Pointing to an old building with quality lumber in it does nothing to refute my point. All we know about an old building that survived for a long time is that it had pretty good lumber. We don’t know what anyone paid for it. So, at best, there’s neither refutation nor support for any position that’s being debated, here.
If you find the receipt for the lumber inside the walls, and it becomes clear that the building was built with the cheapest possible hardware store wood, then we’d have something to talk about.
No I’ve taken apart some terrible, rotted messes. Junk. I understand survivorship bias.
Besides, don’t take my anecdote for it, just go look up industry discussion on age of timber stocks, and rapid to-market silviculture vs old growth
If you’re saying there are real, trustworthy statistics that say modern lumber is from newer growth, then I will provisionally accept that maybe I’m incorrect.
I still don’t think that maps directly onto some Boomer looking at a warped 2x4 in Home Depot and declaring that he used to be able to use hardware store lumber as a straight-edge, back in 1970. Boomers DEFINITELY remember shit incorrectly. That’s a hill I’ll die on.
I haven’t torn into that many old houses, but enough to know that shitty building materials have always been shitty. If anything, at least building standards are better in many, though not necessarily all, ways than they used to be.
Eh. Once you get past a certain age in houses, you do start seeing some pretty fundamental differences. Like, wood density: the pine that’s used in essentially all residential building now is very light weight, with large growth rings. Most of that is from managed forests, where fast-growing trees have been favored over pretty much anything else. You also see that older homes tend to use larger pieces of lumber, because they didn’t know exactly what load limits were, and tended to over-build things (according to modern standards) as a result.
I lived in a neighborhood in Chicago that had always been very working-class, in a house that was constructed in the 1920s. All of the trim was, IIRC, alder. I tried to replace some of it, and it simply wasn’t possible to buy alder trim-even at the finest hardwood supply store in the city–that wasn’t full of knots and wormholes. 2/4 boards that were 8" wide–the width of the baseboards–just didn’t exist; there probably aren’t any alder trees available to logging companies that are large enough to get 8" clear boards out of.
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Is it impractical/impossible to return/exchange it?
Cheapest lumber available used to be good lumber
Yeah. I’m still against clear cutting old growth forests. We could do better in managing patches to avoid the pus.
I bet biotech will be giving us improved wood. We talk about lab-grown meat, I wonder if lab-grown wood will ever be a thing. Engineered wood, but engineered growth.
The trick is that many of the factors that make wood more or less structurally desirable are environmental rather than genetic, and there’s always a tension between things that are good for productivity (I e., rapid tree growth) and performance (tight growth rings and dense fibers).
Engineered wood is already giving us better wood. LVLs, LSLs, and PSLs are stronger, straighter, and more stable than solid sawn lumber, for a price. In commercial construction cross-laminated timber is giving us the performance and fire safety benefits of mass timber construction without requiring the destruction of old-growth forests. You just gotta pay the premium associated with those products, rather than budgeting for utility-grade scotch-pine-fir and expecting every board to be so straight that it scores a 0 in the Kinsey scale.
Man, that’d be awesome. I would swoon for lab grown high figured exotic woods.
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Ea-nasir says hello
I’M LYLE WRATH AND THIS IS POST-MARKET DISCHARGE!
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