Board Foot Uselessness

A buddy and I were talking the other day about the price of 4/4 oak vs 8/4 oak and the thought occurred to us. The whole concept of board foot was developed to equalize pricing over different sizes of wood. The very fact that thicker wood costs more per board foot in the current lumber market, completely ignores this fact.

I think it is intellectually dishonest. If you are going to charge more for thicker wood, why the hell just not list it in price per linear foot?

Reply to
Bruce
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A thicker, or wider, or longer board is more valuable than one that is less thick, less wide, less long.

In this it is no different than any other model of availability versus cost (cf supply and demand).

Board foot pricing is done in preference to linear foot pricing because boards that are in the rough do not fit into standards of width and the net volume of the wood is described by the gross width times the gross thickness times the gross length.

Regards, Tom Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania

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Reply to
Tom Watson

"Current lumber market" has nothing to do with it. Thicker wood will always cost more. First off, the thicker you slice a log, the greater the amount of waste, so there is a lower yield of usable wood per log. Also, thicker wood is more difficult to dry properly, and losses due to defects induced during drying are greater, which lowers yield further. Hence the higher price.

Because that does not take into account the width of the board.

Board-foot pricing accounts for length, width, and thickness. If the dealer does not price by board foot, he must price by square foot, with separate per-square-foot prices for each thickness. This is indistinguishable from board-foot pricing.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)

Reply to
Doug Miller

And how wide would that board being sold by the linear foot be? That question basically answers your question of why bf.

Thicker lumber is more valuable for a number of reason, not the least of which is that it is increasingly harder to come by and correspondingly expensive to produce.

Reply to
Swingman

Reply to
Steve Turner

That seem to make more sense...Tom >From: Steve Turner snipped-for-privacy@H2OlooWoodworks.com

Steve wrote:

the ma>> A buddy and I were talking the other day about the price of 4/4 oak vs 8/4

Someday, it'll all be over....

Reply to
Tom

I guess I should have made it clear that I understand why thicker and wider wood costs more. What I'm suggesting is that the purpose of the board foot was for the same reason we sell steak by the pound and not each steak. It was a fair way to assess value to different sizes of wood since wood comes in so many different sizes. I'm just saying it isn't being used that way, at least not 100%. It is equivelant to saying sirloin steaks are $5.00 a pound but if you want them thickly sliced, it is $6.00 a pound.

Reply to
Bruce

Your reasoning why wood is sold by the board foot is wrong. By the board foot is simply a way to charge for 144 cubic inches of wood. Regardless of the type of wood, a board foot is a specific measurement and quantity of wood. Different cuts of wood from a specific tree will sell for different prices. As for your steak comparison, why does a pound of steak cost $5.00 and a pound of Tender Loin cost $10? They both come from the same cow don't they.

Reply to
Leon

LOL .... Damn, I just love your logic! ;>)

Reply to
Swingman

It works just that way. Honest. the stores get more per pound for thin sliced boneless pork chops.

I usually buy meat at BJ's as the price is good, but today Stop & Shop had whole loins on sale for $1.79 a pound. They took that same piece of meat and were selling it cut into roasts for $4.49 and boneless cops for $3.39. Amazing. It all starts out as the same thing. Yes, I've seen thicker cut steaks at higher prices also. I save a bundle buying primal cuts and doing it myself though.

You may also notice that wider boards also command a higher price than narrow ones. There is a premium as there is far less of them available. I think it works the same way with thicker also, but as pointed out, longer kiln times would make a difference also. My supplier has a gauge that he puts on the wood to read out the board feet of the random width boards that I buy. Only takes a second and it is accurate.

If you want to buy and pay by the linear foot, you can do so at Home Depot. They price hardwoods that way and all are uniform width. Ed snipped-for-privacy@snet.net

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Reply to
Edwin Pawlowski

I'm guessing maybe you're pointing to something that annoys me. How a 1 x 6 is actually 3/4" x 5'3/4".

I know I'm not the only one to dork up a project due to forgetting that wood is not the size it's actually sold as. Wood is expensive enough, is it too much to ask for that extra 1/4", rather than forcing me to buy the next size up and end up with alot of waste from milling it down?

Reply to
Halon1211

OK, I'll pile on. The main difference is because per linear foot doesn't take width into account. Do you want linear foot prices for 4" wide, 6" wide, 8" wide, etc? Of course, you would need that for 4/4, 5/5, 6/4, etc, so now instead of having a per BF price for different thicknesses, you would have per LF pricing for a combination of width and thickness. Presto! Twice the number of variables. I think we'll stay with board feet.

todd

Reply to
todd

Your not looking at it right. A board foot is 144" square inches(12x12x1) It doesn't matter how thick or wide it is, its still sold at a board foot. I buy a lot of 5/4 and 12/4 poplar for frames, the 12/4 is the same price as the

5/4(1.55 bf). I can see why you might pay a premium for some exotic woods, but most domestic should be the same.
Reply to
ChairMan

Cubic, cubic, cubic...

-Doug

Reply to
Doug Winterburn

If the BF pricing is variale based on width and thickness, why does it make any diff to price it by board foot or linear foot?

Seems to me we're talking pounds or kilograms... It makes no difference what the unit is.

Which is what Bruce's original point was. The concept of a BF was, at one point, to negate the variance in how the wood was cut and price it by the volume you were buying.

Once the pricing per BF varies with thickness and width, the wood may as well be priced per linear foot, as you're no longer buying a

*volume* of wood, you're buying a *particular* board...

By the linear foot.

djb

Reply to
Dave Balderstone

Well, where I shop, the total price is just marked on each board, so all of this is a moot point.

To address your question, with board feet pricing, there is one variable - thickness. With linear foot pricing, there are two variables - thickness and width. I think it's just a practical matter of posting prices. If you have a price sheet for linear foot, for each species you would have to have a matrix of thickness and width to arrive at a per LF price for a particular board. As we know with BF pricing, you just have a price for each thickness. It seems to me that LF pricing works on things like molding where the only variable is length. That gets me thinking about another way to explain this.

A pricing scheme should be based on the number of variables in the product. Molding is priced per LF because that's the only variable. Since hardwood lumber is variable by both length and width (for a given thickness) you need a measurement that takes both into account (a la board feet). I think you could have a better argument for a per square foot pricing model for lumber that a per linear foot.

todd

Reply to
todd

Wrong, and demonstrably so.

My point.

I think lineal foot is, in essence, a square foot measurement.

djb

Reply to
Dave Balderstone

Dave Balderstone notes:

Possibly not, but the board foot measurement evened things out, removed one variable. Go back to linear feet in the hopes of benefiting the consumer, and you get a true diversity of effect. Check out prices on the few hardwoods Lowe's and HD sell the next time you're at one. They sell by linear feet and the prices range from double bf costs to triple.

You think? Bruce believes this. I don't. It was to remove a variable.

Thicker boards cost more because they are more difficult to dry, usually creating greater losses in the kiln, thus raising the price per cubic inch (since you don't like working with bf).

Charlie Self

"The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf." Will Rogers

Reply to
Charlie Self

Wouldn't thinner cuts waste more wood as saw kerfs?

Barry

Reply to
B a r r y B u r k e J r .

Board foot is a volume measure. You can have length measures, area measures, volume measures and value measures. The first two are obviously too trivial to be useful (usually). The last (taking into account extra-value for wide boards, good figure etc.) is too complex to be widely useful.

So volume measures sit at a usability maximum between being too sophisticated and not sophisticated enough. Anyone with a tape measure can use it, and it's (almost) unambiguous and objective, no matter who does the measuring.

Here in the UK, we also use volume measures, but use the cubic foot instead of the board foot (12 bf in a cube foot).

Only at retail. If you're buying a whole flitch (a sawn butt) from a small timberyard, you'll probably deal in cube feet or bf. Anything else just gets too complex to work out. Wood is cheap, bulky and awkward to assess or judge more precisely than this - and you've both got other work to be getting on with.

BTW - Do you ever use "Hoppus feet" or similar in the USA ? They're a measure for round logs, indicating a value based on their likely yield as sawn timber.

-- Die Gotterspammerung - Junkmail of the Gods

Reply to
Andy Dingley

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