Been cutting a lot of PT wood in the shop the last few months and you're right, some is so wet that you have to have a towel handy when cutting it.
Often the past year or so an entire pallet of HD tubafours is dripping wet 'peel cores' from the plywood mills ... this stuff does not readily accept the treatment and warps like crazy after it dries to around 30% ... an entirely useless product, sold at a premium price to those who don't care, or know the difference.
Swingman wrote: ...
There are a couple of the low-price farm stores here carrying line fence posts from them... :(
peeler cores are almost always juvenile wood, it takes about 15 years of growth before SYP starts producing strong stable wood, that's why they get so crazy warped up.
So yeah, they're junk.
basilisk
basilisk wrote: ...
???
Trees add growth on the outer boundaries so the cores are the oldest wood in the tree.
True, but not for that reason...
--
Yes, it is the oldest wood in the tree, but it was formed when the tree was a juvenile and is referred to as such in the lumber and paper business.
Stated another way the tree had to reach a certain age before it could produce quality wood fiber.
basilsik
In other words one should avoid heartwood at all costs?
not at all, heartwood in pine is another issue and may take many years to form, most southern pine is cut(now) before it ever gets to the heartwood stage in its life.
The young tree wood or juvenile wood stage in a tree may be passed in as little as an inch in diameter or it may last to six or eight inches in diameter in a plantation pine. Depends entirely on the growing conditions.
basilisk
IIRC Stallmans sells Kiln Dried PT lumber.
On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:00:09 -0400, Nova wrote the following:
They all do that. Since PT is made using only the -finest- in SPF, given half a chance and a sunny day, it twists on less than a nickel.
-- It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. -- Charles Darwin
On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:53:18 -0500, dpb wrote the following:
That's the main reason I don't do that style of line fence. I haven't seen any good stock in town anywhere and half the new line fences of the peeler style are warped as hell, up to 3" off true in any given green peeler.
I suggested that another client get her own "cherrytone" landscaping peelers because I would have to charge her for the winnowing process at an hourly rate. Her husband has a pickup and they bought the first batch, so the suggestion wasn't as far out of line as it may have sounded.
There is far too much crap wood being sold everywhere nowadays. I asked the guys at both local lumberyards why they didn't have a slightly better grade of PT lumber. He said that people wouldn't pay for it. I told him that my clients and I had discussed it and all would be happy to pay up to 50% extra to get lumber which was sound, which wouldn't warp as it dried, and was properly dried after treatment. They suggested my telling it to the owners, who are seldome around. Oh well...
-- It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. -- Charles Darwin
--------------------------------------------- SFWIW.
When I built my glass measuring table to build the boat, built a frame of doubled 2x6's with two layers of 1/2 CDX for the top.
The legs are also 2x6's.
All the 2x6 were green Doug Fir and took about a month in the California sun to dry out.
Since this table would be set on bare dirt, needed to preserve the bottom foot with some kind of sheep dip.
Chose a copper based green goop from the H/D.
Got 4 empty plastic antifreeze jugs, cut off the tops and put each leg in it's own bottle.
Poured the green goop into each jug and repeated this process each day for about 10 days.
Let it rest another 2 weeks, then gave everything two coats of primer and a couple of finish coats of floor & porch enamel.
A week later, placed table in service, outdoor, on bare dirt.
18 years later, the legs were in great shape; however, the CDX needed some help, even though it was covered with a silver tarp when out of service.YMMV
Lew
That's what I did when I built my deck and after the PT decking dried out, I have too big a gap for my tastes. If I had it to do over, I would have butted the PT boards and let the gap for drainage develop on it's own as the wood dried out. For this reason I would not go for the Kreg system, not to mention a 100 bucks is too much for this tool, particularly if you are not in the deck business. I have no complaints about the standard screw from the top, but the EB-TY system looks good if I wanted to eliminate visible fasteners.
That's what I thought when I built my deck, and used a 16d nail as a spacer. The PT was not sopping wet, it was fairly dry for PT stuff, and damn, I wish I had ignored my instinct. Of course, had I done that, the damn stuff certainly would not have shrink, but expanded. Instinct is hard to ignore....
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