Why are studs 92-5/8 inches

[Jerome Tews]

It looks like this newsgroup is no longer about home repair, just politics. But I'll post this anyhow.

Ive worked on a lot of homes over the years and normally just bought 8 ft 2x4s and cut them to fit existing buildings. I'm building a fairly large garden shed and when I went to price 8ft 2x4s, I found they cost $1.42 more than 92-5/8" studs. Buying these slightly shorter boards will save me over $80. The 3-3/8" difference is insignificant. But this has me asking why do they use such an odd figure? Putting a 2x4 on top and the bottom of a wall, adds 3 inches. So the wall is 3/8" short of an 8ft wall. So what is the deal with this 3/8".

[gfretwell]

Maybe drywall is only 95 3/8 inches long these days. It is that commie metric stuff :-)

[Jack Legg Construction]

It is done for the same reason doctors speak Latin...to confuse you so they can charge more.

[Terry Coombs]

  Nope , the sheetrock is still 96" long and 48" wide . By the time you add the second top plate , you end up with a ceiling framing height of just over 8 feet . Add a layer on the ceiling and you get just enough room to space the wall board at a quarter inch from the ceiling and a half inch or so from subfloor . I've got about 7 more sheets awaiting closet finishing and one short wall in the new bedroom . It's been a lot of fun ... and now even more fun , I get to learn how to use drywall stilts .

[dpb]

[Mark Lloyd]

I press K (Thunderbird's "kill thread" command) as soon as I see anything political in the subject line. It takes much less time to read this group than it used to.

[gfretwell]

That assumes a double top plate. Typically in non-load bearing walls you single plate the top.

[dpb]

Well, it's outlining the "why" of the standard precut length, _not_ instructing in framing technique.

Conventional framing used double top plate to have nailing for potential crown moulding as well as for the load plus that enables to use precuts everywhere. Only in the relatively recent past has saving a couple tubafores been much of an objective.

If you're going to single top plate, then precuts aren't going to work for those walls so you've got to trim fulls and in the end probably don't save much in material counting the cutoffs plus the added labor.

[gfretwell]

I haven't seen a wood partition wall around here in years. They use steel with no particular structural strength at all. They need to use wood in the door frames, just to have something to screw the hardware into. Typical 5.5" crown is not going to hit that double top plate anyway. I have seen 2.5" crown but not in any house built in the last 40 years. It was usually seen as "home owner store" stuff.

[angelicapaganelli]

Commercial or residential? They put up a subdivision across the street, and it was a forest of whitewood 2x4s.

Cindy Hamilton

[Clare Snyder]

The good builders around here still use lumber, but a LOT of tin stud in the cheaper stuff. Instead of the sruds holding up the drywall as in conventional construction, the drywall holds up the studs. In the cheapest crap they even fasten the door casings to the tin studs. Door trim hets glued to the casing.

[rbowman]

Residential building here are wood studs and OSB wrapped in Tyvek. Cookie cutter or custom, it's all the same. I worked for a builder a long time ago and his secret was a fireplace and hardwood floors. Everything else was the cheapest way possible.

I recall q friend who was an architect talking about a new technique for block construction. Basically the wall was laid up dry and sprayed with a polymer. It was cheaper and stronger that the traditional method. Two problems: the masons' union and without mortar joints none of the standard windows or doors fit. It died on the vine.

[dpb]

On 8/31/2018 12:39 AM, [e-mail] wrote: ...

...

Places vary...here, at least, I've yet to see any one-owner residential construction other than conventional wood framing; I noticed one federally-subsidized low-rent apartment complex did use the metal studs a couple years ago.

There have been several commercial buildings recently including three motels, a Loves truck stop and a new MickeyD's that have all been conventional wood framing as well...I was particularly interested they did that at the Love's that has some 12-ft wall heights.

And, again, all the linked-to article is is "why" precuts are the length they are, nothing more. So far, it's still popular-enough there's sufficient demand they keep producing them that way...

[trader_4]

Residential is almost all lumber here, NJ, too. The exception might be some high end contemporary custom homes, but it's been years since I saw one of those.

[angelicapaganelli]

Fire code?

We had some partitions put up where I work, and they were metal studs.

Cindy Hamilton

[gfretwell]

1&2 family. That must be a northern thing

[gfretwell]

They like steel because it doesn't warp and termites don't eat it.

[gfretwell]

Commercial has always liked metal because it is easier to install and remove when they are reconfiguring office space. There are also seldom any load bearing walls in a commercial building other than the outside walls and the core. Realistically there are few load bearing walls in a single family either with truss construction. The load bearing walls will be wood tho, if they are not block.

[dpb]

Who knows what is in the spec package when the Fed's get involved for the subsidy monies; there's no telling what it may say. It certainly isn't local Code; possibly part of the Fed spec. These were done "cookie cutter" style by a non-local outfit that apparently these are their specialty. I presumed it was just mass-produced cost minimization but that may no be the whole reason, granted.

That's pretty-much a normal thing; the few sizable office-type buildings or warehouses/shops with an office space are mostly that way, too, or use one of the fully-independent movable partitions systems that aren't even actually "framed" at all.

[angelicapaganelli]

Block construction in homebuilding is vanishingly rare up here.

My house was built in 1948 by a mason for his own family; it's a rare exception. I've got a big-ass bearing wall to support the hand-built roof. (I suspect it was built from salvaged lumber, since nearly every piece has purposeless holes, and quite a few members are pieced together.) He and his brothers did a great job on the block and on the stone veneer; not so good on the carpentry.

Cindy Hamilton