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The lowly wedge sometimes gets very little respect. If your plant is doing it right, the wedges usually are cut from drops or culls. That’s a good way of doing it, and it sounds very simple, but not just any piece of wood is suitable for a wedge. There are important qualifications that...

How many times have you seen your competitor or other businesses in your area copy what you produce or offer? Maybe it is the kind of company that takes a photo of some trusses, puts themselves in front of it, and says, “Look at me, I am the same kind of company they are.” Flattery...

Encouragingly, there have been several recent developments coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or affecting EPA policies, that we wanted to share with readers, as they positively affect wood product manufacturers.  New Source Review Advancing At a recent meeting...

If you enjoy watching any of the many home improvement shows where the hosts pick an older home to renovate, you notice they always talk about the “bones” of the house. In their opinion, this is one of the most important features of any potential renovation job. Typically, they...

4 Costly Bear Market Mistakes! What could possibly be worse than missing a huge bullish market move? There are four critical bull market mistakes. Actually, they go both ways...bull and bear markets. Failure to acknowledge that the trend/price direction is preparing to reverse. This...

We’re now at the point where everyone is on board with the idea of change. Management and staff have indicated a willingness to take steps to improve. So how do we proceed? What processes learned from Lean Manufacturing can we use to make progress? As discussed last month in the 5th...

Writing Standards of Performance (SOP) isn’t like writing a job description, but a job description should be used for guidance. SOP is a performance measurement document that identifies the employee’s expected level of performance. When you have a realistic SOP, your employee and...

A couple years ago, I did a post on selecting holdown anchorage solutions. At the time, we had created a couple engineering letters that tabulated SSTB, SB and PAB anchor solutions for each holdown to simplify specifying anchor bolts. About a year later, a salesperson suggested we tabulate SSTB,...

This isn’t the last word on housing, but only my perspective after nearly 50 years of observation. If I could have chosen any time to have started in this business, I would choose the last five years. It certainly wouldn’t have been in the turbulent 1970s (when I started) or the...

When I wrote my first Advertiser Forum column, for the December 2015 issue, I concluded with the following statement, which is as true today as it was then: So we can’t promise that you’ll agree with everything you read here. We can’t promise that everyone will read...