For the wood truss industry, the single most important component in a component plant is LUMBER. Nothing is as price volatile. Nothing else takes up more physical space. Nothing else requires more constant cash or credit line. Nothing impacts the physical appearance and structural integrity of...

From worst-case scenarios to less obvious examples, do you have general guidelines that will help you make informed decisions? For example, when faced with lumber defects on the table, do you know how the builders in your plant will proceed? More importantly, are they being supplied with the...

Snow, ice and cold sent contractors on eastern U.S. job sites running for cover the end of last week. That is not the case country wide, however it is a possibility in 80% of the continental U.S. now through the end of February. One can only ponder, in the depths of winter, how could our...

The phone rang this morning and the caller said that “they had a real quick question.” They went on to ask if “standard truss plates could be used with pressure treated lumber?” Hmmmm…the questions that some questions prompt. It sort of reminds me of the...

A couple of weeks ago Thom McAnally, publisher of Component Advertiser, asked if I would write a summary of how following Layman's Lumber Guide Forecasts helped/ or could have helped you in 2015. My first inclination was to create the graph below to determine that 37 of 52 weeks, our lumber...

Evaluation November was a funky weather month. The east fielded above average rainfall, the western mountains got some snow, even though most temperatures were above average over the entire nation. There are pockets of pent up demand, like northern TX and Oklahoma, although on the whole,...