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.
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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