For anyone wondering what this is, I’m pretty sure it’s the Crooked Forest in Poland.
And for the other part I guess Home depot is an american thing.
Its just a hardware store with a indoor lumber yard.
With a theme tune that slaps way harder than it has any right to.
A few months ago I was following an Instagram page about sustainability and they posted this pic and claimed the trees grew like that because of a “sideways gravitational pull” 🙄. This was on what’s supposed to be a page about science. And of course there were tons of people who believed it.
There was a big storm around 2009 in the south west of France (where there are a lot of pine tree plantations); an entire generation of trees ended up looking like this.
Basically, strong continuous winds flatten very young trees without killing them. They then keep growing, with a permanent kink in trunk, near the base such as these. Not great for sawing into planks, but they work just fine to make paper and agglomerate.
It’s incredible how resilient trees are!
strong continuous winds flatten very young trees without killing them. They then keep growing, with a permanent kink
That’s what happened to Chuck Berry
Not great for sawing into planks, but they work just fine to make paper and agglomerate.
are you saying you’re willing to cut these majestic fellas down??
TFW the “good” pile is the same as the cull pile
There’s some in saskatchewan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_Trees
Funny meme aside, there’s usually no good reason to pick up each and every 2x4 in the store and close one eye to stare down it to judge how straight it is before buying.
It’s wood. It bends. You attach it at both ends. If you attach it straight, it’s gonna be straightly attached.
When you actually need a straight piece of wood for finer woodwork like making a guitar fretboard or similar, you make that piece of wood straight yourself by buying a large piece of wood directly from the sawmill and shaping it yourself.
I’m going to whole heartedly disagree. Does it need to be perfectly straight? No. Am I going to eyeball each one to make sure I don’t spend half the project with prybars? Yes.
Also I’m deep in American Pacific Northwest timber country and the mills don’t do business with individuals in my experience unless you’re bringing your own trees.
And I’m not paying money to get the equipment to plane my own 2x10s nor am I going to be able to pressure treat my own lumber.
It’s insane to me that the response to the decline in lumber quality is make your own lumber.
What are you building that requires perfectly straight wood?
It doesn’t have to be perfectly straight, but I’d like things to be reasonable square to prevent as much extra work as possible.
It does not need to be straight, but I’m not in the sporting goods section looking for a hockey stick.
You don’t want to make hockey stick from a bend piece of wood anyway. Those are made of carbon fibre, and if you want a one from wood it’d be better to use some kind of laminate glued to shape, otherwise it’d feel dead and probably break when used.
I think there is a middle ground
Sounds like you don’t do much precision or creative woodworking. Here’s one for you, i made a cat wheel out of wood. A wheel. It has to be perfectly straight to roll on castors or else it’ll be a shit wheel or hurt the cat. A few months back I was working on a bookshelf,that you can slot and take apart when you need to move with little inserts that have to line up just right, you really want straight wood for that or else things aren’t gonna work.
I’ll tell ya too, living in the suburbs outside of Chicago, you don’t get a lot of lumber mills that are small and local, and the actual big mills are like an hour drive and you have to pay a premium to buy in bulk. Sometimes you have to go to home Depot and buy their shit wood. I have a planer so I can deal but it’s still a hassle I’d rather avoid. I don’t know what someone without $300 to spend is gonna do
I got a lot of downvotes… Is your wood really that shit? I buy the cheapest crap in Europe and it’s still… straight (enough) for ordinary construction and even more. It’s only if I needed unfixed poles or detail work that I’d ever consider looking for “straight wood”. We do have shit wood but that’s mainly aesthetics. Look at the edge. Bendy boards are totally fine. They’ll attach just fine.
Anyway, warning, long story coming in:
The only time I’ve purchased wood directly from a mill was for a musical instrument. My friend wanted to build a fretless basd and asked if I wanted to come along for the ride. Sure, dude.
So he got some kind of hardwood from Southern America perfectly cut but still a spare and it cost him more than buying a god damn finished fretless bass.
The best part is that the idiot never even followed through and built it.
He still has that $200 piece of perfect wood somewhere in his boxes of stuff that he didn’t unpack the last 2 times that he moved.
Anyway, go ahead and eyeball the wood. I don’t mind.
Not “my wood” specifically home Depot wood. The joke is that the company is infamous for having shit wood
I know and I get the meme, hence the introductionary disclaimer, but it appears that I really hit nail on people eyeballing wood in discount wood supply stores for no good reason…
OP is mostly correct, the construction grade boards the home centers sell are going to have some level of warping. If you don’t want to deal with that you need to go to an actual lumber store. There’s one in most cities. In Seattle (well Ballard…) Limback Lumber is a great place to visit.
I have nothing against warped wood, but when it makes a 45° bend halfway in I grab a different one
Yeah sure, I doubt anyone would try to sell that as a 2x4.
Anyway the point is that the professional carpenters don’t give a shit about it, so neither should DIYers. Once the 2x4 is put up and covered in drywall, nobody will ever know if it has a mild curve.
The actual thing to watch out for are the edges if they are visible in the end project and also cuts that position the knots poorly. I’ve seen 2x4s where a knot went halfway through the width, which would would only hold half the weight that it’s supposed to.
Tell that to the closet door I can’t close all the way because the goddamn builders couldn’t be bothered to make sure it was right.
You’re kind of making his point, as well as showing why it results in a subpar finished product.
How can I make his point AND show it results in a sub par product
If your wood for your wall is bowed, and you match the bows, your wall will have a slight bow or cup depending on which side you’re looking at. If you don’t match them, it adds strain on your drywall and may cause deformations. The taller the wall, the more obvious this will be. If your wood is doglegged, it will be almost impossible to match that. Twisting is more of a problem because if it’s bad enough you’re either going to spend a lot of time and fasteners correcting it or you’re going to have a board that doesn’t line up with the rest of them since a board on the diagonal has a greater depth than a square board. This can also cause problems when attaching drywall.
It’s less hassle, and possibly less time wasted picking better boards for your project than it is correcting those defects during your project. It also doesn’t cost any more.
why cant we use something else like extruded polystyrene for lumber? or bearboard plastic lumber?
Because plastic is shit for the environment, and wood literally grows on trees?
Like why do you want to replace lumber with plastic?
if it can be made from recycled plastic that could help the environment
By creating way more CO2 in the process to further accelerate a climate disaster?
Your heart is in the right place - just the execution is wrong.
We could use loads of different materials but it’s just they all have their pros and cons. With price being a big factor.
You ask me, we’d all use concrete all day erryday. Even more than we do.
My parents had a deck made out of some kind of plastic that looked and felt like wood at their old house. It looked good and didn’t seem to have any issues after like 15 years. Haven’t seen that stuff anywhere else. Maybe it’s too expensive.
I just made a deck with that a few years ago. There are actually two types: composite (wood covered in plastic) and full plastic. The boards are perfectly straight and it’ll never need stain. It was definitely more expensive, but it’s nice up here in Michigan.
It cost a fortune but it works better especially in harsh climates.
i wonder if anyone is recycling plastic for it
I forget what its called. Its nice though
/shock
