The squeaky little guy with pop-bottle glasses at the head of the lumber line has everyone behind him in thrall. The lineup includes a bunch of burly guys with Popeye forearms, giant tape measures holstered on their hips and heads that look hard enough to hammer nails in all by themselves.
They’re hanging on the pipsqueak’s every word.
“LVL,” he says. “Microllam. LSL rim boards. Five-eighths OSB. PSL arch. Dimensional PT. TJI 10×32. ACX half-inch, CDX three-quarters. Doug or SPF prime, no hem-fir. Finger-jointed utilities. TK S4S cedar five-four fascia.”
He’s speaking lumber-tech, the new language of building. A grasp of the language puts you at the front of the line in any hardware or lumber store these days. Gone are the days when a customer could saunter in with a vocabulary that included two phrases: “two-by-fours” and “plywood.” With the new engineered wood products flooding the market, even hobbyists need a lexicon more akin to Microsoft than a sawmill.
Here are a few of the new terms and what they mean. Included are some of the old terms:
Common lumber: This is just plain wood, old-fashioned 2-by-4s and 2-by-6s and 1-by-12s. The measurements refer to rough-cut lumber. With milled lumber, customers pay for a lot of sawdust left behind at the mill. See the chart for the milled dimensions.
Finger-jointed studs: These are not the guys in bars who play tricks with their flexible fingers. This is utility-grade lumber made from scraps overlapped and glued together.
Hem-fir: This is a lumberyard grab-all term for wood that may include western hemlock, red fir, grand fir, noble fir, silver fir and almost anything other than Douglas fir. Douglas fir is the king of softwoods because of its dimensional stability. Some builders won’t use anything else.
Glulam: Pieces of real wood laminated together to form a stronger beam than can be found in a single piece of wood.
LSL (laminated strand lumber): Made by reducing a log to thin strands up to 13 inches long that are bonded together to form various trademarked products.
LVL (laminated veneer lumber): These are used in conjunction with I-beams as a substitute for dimensional lumber, which is the big, heavy stuff cut from old-growth. Yes, this is meant to make you feel guilty about killing old trees.
Microllam: This is usually made from wood waste to resist warping, splitting and shrinkage. Thin pieces bend easily for such things as arches.
OSB (oriented strand board): This is what builders are using for most walls, roofs and floors. Strands of wood fiber are oriented crosswise and glued together to form a plywood substitute. It comes in thicknesses up to 11/8-inches. Unlike plywood, the sides are not graded, there being nothing to grade.
Plywood: Unlike common lumber, what you see is what you get. All manufactured lumber comes in real sizes, no cheating. When buying plywood, refer to the grade to get exactly what you want. A-grade is smooth; B-grade has plugs and synthetic fillers in the cracks; C-grade has knotholes up to 1 inches across and some splits; D-grade is the split ends of the hairy lumber world. Each side of a sheet of plywood has a grade, as in CDX, ABX and such. The X doesn’t mean anything; it’s just there because it looks cool.
Parallam: Manufactured from strains of a single wood species, the strands are oriented parallel to the length of the piece and coated with adhesive.
PT (pressure-treated lumber): This wood is used when ground contact is required or it is constantly exposed to the weather. Preservatives and fire retardants are injected under high pressure, resulting in a copperish color. Regular nails or screws will corrode when in contact with PT lumber. Use coated nails or screws.
SPF (spruce-pine-fir): This is the A list of building products, referring to top-grade stuff that is straight, white and dimensionally stable, meaning it won’t warp when it rains.
TJI (Trus Joist International): These manufactured beams take the place of conventional lumber. They’re half the weight and take up half the space, yet are straighter and stronger than big, long chunks of timber usually sawed from old-growth logs. TJIs look like the I-beams from an erector set, with a bunch of wood chips glued together in the middle and some wood flanges on top and bottom to nail into.
TK: Usually refers to cedar boards with some “tight” knots, or ones that don’t splay all over and result in a weak board. The term S4S mean smooth on all four sides. Clear cedar has no knots. It’s cut from old trees. See the above.
Jim Kjeldsen is a former assistant news editor at The Herald who now owns and operates La Conner Hardware Store in La Conner.
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