I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you’d think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.
I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you’d think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.
Shouldn’t the normal size be 2? Given, well, the name?
You’d think so, but no.
Short story is the ‘nominal’ size is the size before going into a planer to smooth the faces.
Yes, it makes little sense, like many things related to construction stuff.
The two-by-fours at your local home center are not 2 inches thick or 4 inches wide…not anymore at least. They spent several weeks at that size though. The sawmill cut them to that size to stack and kiln dry, and then when removed from the kiln they are then milled straight and square. Used to be they would sell the rough stock to carpenters who would do the milling themselves, but then they figured out that the railroads were charging them a fortune to ship a lot of wood that was going to be ground to sawdust anyway, so they started milling the boards before shipment. Same amount of construction lumber arrives at the construction site and it took less fuel for the locomotive to deliver it.
Lol. Trying to find lumber that’s straight and square is a pipe dream these days.
It was straight and square when it was milled. Problem is that the big box stores cut corners during the kiln drying phase, so the boards have a ton of moisture still in them. As that dries, the boards twist and cup.
Plus poor protection from the elements at each storage step, which means rapid temp changes, which also causes wood movement.
Go to a local lumber yard. They tend to do a better job at kiln drying. You’re still going to have warped boards, but far fewer in my experience.
Yeah, once I get my garage sorted out (and buy a jointer or make a Jig for my planer) I’m going to start getting rough cut lumber and finish it myself.
I tried the sled with shims on my thickness planer. It worked, but it was certainly a pain in the ass and unwieldy due to weight and length.
Picked up a 6" bench top jointer. Not great at long boards due to length of the feeds. Picked up some roller stands hoping that would be close enough, but I moved and the garage needs a lot of work before I can try them out.
If you can pick up a full floor sized jointer and have room for it, you’ll save yourself several headaches if you plan on jointing a ton of rough cut lumber.
I have to talk to someone at the lumber yard though …
I’ve had better luck at a real lumber yard, instead of the big box stores.
It’s the same 10 pieces on the top of the pile for weeks. Everyone is reaching for the pieces under. As long as it’s not 2x2PT
Which is why I buy stock rough sawn and mill it myself.
That’s my plan once I find a used jointer for sale.
if you own a thickness planer, you don’t immediately need a jointer. You can flatten a face with a sled and shims in the planer, and joint edges a frillion different ways. I have a jointer and sometimes I use my router table for edge jointing.
Lumber is weird because it has been industry standard to lie about dimensions since before the US existed so it’s just kinda a thing they get to do
How could you use bundle when Business is the collective noun?
What are you talking about
A group of Ferrets is called a Business, or Busyness
This, my friend, is no mere “group” of ferrets. It is a horrific amalgam of a quantity greater than 300, bound together with simple twine in a structure of horrific dimension in a way that could only have been conceived by a mind twisted in reckless disregard to even a most basic understanding of the nature of our world.
As if american measurements have ever made sense. Look up how they measure screws or wires and despair.
Or shotgun shell sizes and loads.
“It all started in 1840 when the dram was a common unit of measurement…”
And they all had onions on their belts as was the style at the time.
Five bees for a nickel.
It’s a wonder they manage to build anything. They have pocket calculators dedicated to the building industry. It’s surreal.
Not everyone
Some people are gods when it comes to metal math
🤘🏻
every house I’ve lived in has had something fucked up in it. Even if you have one guy doing everything correct, you have 20 other contractors coming in that can’t do basic addition and subtraction, let alone fractions.
I don’t think you’re implying this is exclusively an American issue or anything but that’s just the nature of construction unless you’re paying top dollar for accuracy when it matters.
I’ve been on a hundred or more construction sites and I’d confidently wager that most houses don’t match the plans perfectly because of unforseen reasons…equipment changing due to lead times, electricians running their conduit in the wrong stud bays, etc. I’ve had to do a lot of creative problem solving and design modifications are inevitable. That’s the only thing I really miss from my old career
I am in chemical and material handling stuff and it’s the same. What amazes me is when the project manager can’t allow slack where slack is perfectly fine and allows slack where it isn’t.
One guy I will never forget had endless meltdowns about tiny tiny stuff in software and completely forgot that water pipes need heat tracing until the insulation was already installed. Whole project, multi tens of millions of dollars, died because of that. On the plus side before it died the password on the HMI was 8 characters long and required a number and a punctuation symbol.
Even when you are paying for accuracy… I went to a home once for someone who paid for the builders to get everything perfect; the walls were crooked and warped like every wall I’ve ever seen.
I’m just saying it doesn’t matter if one guy is really good because on projects that require multiple people a good team is all that matters. As far as uniqueness to the US vs everywhere, its probably worse here in the US but we have a lot of checks for extreme fuckups so we tend to just have a lot of low-mid tier fuckups. The big fuckups are when somebody lies on their expertise (like that university post tensioned beam bridge that fell in florida)
My parents just had a house built last year and there is so much shit wrong. The biggest thing I found is one of the alcoves on the side of their fireplace is a full 1.5" wider in the front than the back. You don’t have to measure to see it. How the fuck the guy who did the framing, or the guy who did the drywall, or anyone else walking past that fucking thing didn’t notice I have no idea. They sold their nice old house for that pile of shit and it’s not even better even if you ignore all the problems. It pisses me off so much because I told them this was going to happen.
Part of that is that you need to work hard to find good people who do good work.
The other issue is that all the skilled works are either old or dead. The young guys aren’t the same type.
What I find is culture drives them out. I am pushed a lot to take away all decision making ability from the techs and electricians. This command-and-control organization system. Anyone who can change employment does and I don’t blame them.
Treat people like they are worthless and they leave. No surprises there.
How do they measure despair?
The European wire gauge system makes no sense. There I said it. I don’t need to know the O.D. of the wire, I need to know the amp rating. The O.D. only becomes an issue for bending radius and there is a chart for that as well. Nothing is stopping some a**hole from making a wire almost completely out of plastic that has the O.D. of a typical 14AWG but can’t carry any serious amount of current under the European system. Under the AWG you always know what the current capacity is.
And while we are at it, you might as well standardize your wire sizes based on copper. You are never going to use anything except copper. So your units should reflect the material. I am building a chemical skid, that has nothing to do with the distance between the equator to the north pole.
Also when is the last time you were running wires that you needed a mm of precision? Meanwhile a fraction of an amp really does matter. So should not the thing that does matter be reflected in the product?
How does 16, 14, or 12 AWG tell you anything about ampacity?
You use the chart. How does mm of a wire, including insulation, tell you ampacity? As I said it is easy to imagine a thick wire that can carry almost no current. You can’t pull that crap with AWG system. It tells you the single most important fact, how much current a wire can carry. There is no incentive for wire manufacturers to cheat the system since a thicker insulation wire just means more cost for them.
Which ties in nicely with the other charts. Tell me how much power you need a motor to deliver and what I have to deal with and I can tell you exactly what wires to use, it’s bending radius how thick it is etc. None of which I can do in the CE system.
Ironically outer insulation does impact conductor ampacity, because the rated continuous vs peak loads depend on the heat resistance rating of the insulation.
European wire gauge is not the outer diameter. It is the cross section of the conductor inside the wire in mm^2. It is the same system AWG uses (they are directly correlated) with the added benefit that the numbers make sense (10mm^2/AWG8 wire has 4x the cross section of 2.5mm^2/AWG14 wire, so a quarter of the resistance of the thicker wire and thus roughly double the current capacity).
I honestly can’t tell if you’re doing a bit or are actually serious.
Sounds like a you problem.
The convention is 2" before milling. Milling takes off 1/4"on each side, so the result is 1.5".
Why was that ever accepted? I don’t care what size it was before milling. If I buy a 2x2 I want a 2x2.
It was done for largely sensible reasons.
https://youtu.be/WaJFudED5FQ?si=7j005FmfJVr_JQL_
In short, a 2x4 was originally 2x4 inches, full stop, but it was found that this size wasn’t necessary for the strength being applied to them in construction. We were wasting lumber for no reason. They went through a few cycles of sizing down as the actual needed strength was understood better. The naming convention stuck, though.
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https://piped.video/WaJFudED5FQ?si=7j005FmfJVr_JQL
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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It’s weird because it’s the size of lumber BEFORE smoothing the edges. Manufacturers take this inch a mile and the 2x4 (as well as all other dimensional lumber) has gotten smaller and smaller.
O that’s the size before planing.