Now 39 years into this lumber gig, there is one thing I have more confidence in than anything else. It is the foundation of my entire lumber career and reason for my success forecasting lumber market timing. The repeating lumber market cycle. Some of it sloshes around, yet, in spite of all the...

Now is the time to consider Spruce-Pine-Fir (SPF) as a substitute for Southern Pine (SP). As noted below, #2 SPF’s 19% higher bending value and only 10% lower compression value usually enables longer spans. Cull rates are generally lower with SPF, and it is lighter and easier to...

Everyone knows that member gaps can be caused by uncalibrated saws and poor jigging stops during truss set-up. But did you know the most likely cause of member gaps is the lumber carriage shifting or moving the lumber at an angle, thereby causing a skewed cut? This is especially true when a gang...

Rationing On May 23, in its most active lumber futures day ever, the market traded $68 of volatility from $15 limit down to $30 limit up and back down $15 to unchanged. Why is that? Futures suspected what we Layman’s Lumber Guide members have known since mid-May. BC mills are not...

What better way to assess buying trends than to recap the lumber specified on truss designs? The following charts illustrate the material derived from 80,000 truss drawings totaling 12.8 Million Board Feet of wood. Not surprisingly, more than half the total volume is consumed by visually graded...

We lumber types have come to expect the unexpected. Hence, there is great value when we can identify, well in advance, what the next price manipulating phenomenon might be. 2018 has been a year of looking for an elusive lumber market top. Early in the year I went so far as to call 2018 a bear...

Southern Pine grading greatly complicates the task of making lumber substitutions. The progression of the structural values of Machine Evaluated Lumber (MEL) is nothing like the progression of values of either Visually Graded or Machine Stress Rated (MSR) lumber, which both ascend like rungs on...

Picking usable lumber involves more than just the initial grade stamp. We can think of the stamp as the first step, but we can’t stop there. Truss fabricators depend on the lumber supplier to provide effective grading protocols that will produce materials with predictable design values....

There are three fundamental lumber market components that will likely combine to make 2018 the most volatile year for prices on record.  LABOR: ICE gave notice last week that it intends to crack down on undocumented workers in the construction industry...on the jobsites. We already...

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...