Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "" video.
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We have been seriously affected by this in Australia.
In February 2009, there were massive bushfires in Victoria which burnt half the state and killed 173 people. Australian timber is almost all hardwood. We have pine forests here but our native forests are all eucalypts - usually very dense hardwoods. The most common trees for our lumber industry have been straight grain trees like the gigantic Eucalyptus Regnans, AKA, the mountain Ash. These are consistently among the tallest trees in the world. In the construction business, the timber is known as ‘KD’ (kiln dried). The largest mountain ash ever found (which had fallen over) measured 435 feet from the base to where it had broken off, at which point it was still three feet across. That’s in the Guinness Book of Records, who speculated that it might have been 500 feet tall. It was found near Trafalgar in Victoria.
During the fires of 2009, huge forested areas of Victoria, the home of mountain ash, were completely destroyed. Now, most Australian trees respond well to fire and it helps them to regrow. Mountain ash doesn’t work that way and it will take 200-300 years for those forests to recover. In fact, the truth is that they may never recover. I was working as a news cameraman at the time and I remember flying over those forests in our helicopter and just seeing thousands of hectares of blackened trees. Total destruction that just left black and spindly and with no green, not even on the forest floor.
As it happened, it seems they can’t even be logged, not because of rules but because the trees were simply too badly damaged to be of any monetary value.
Our ‘big box store’, as you call it, is Bunnings. I had to go there a few years ago to get a piece of timber to repair my mother’s garage. I was appalled at the quality. It was full of knots and every bit as warped and bowed as anything you’ve shown here. A lot of it was heartwood too. It took me about 15 minutes of sorting through this rubbish to find anything worth having. Then I noticed a few other things that made my blood boil. First of all, the price was ridiculous, especially considering it was mostly unusable. The second problem was that it had ‘Not Structural Grade’ stamped on it. That didn’t matter so much for this project. Finally, it said ‘Product of Brazil’. This was at a time when Bolsonaro was declaring open slather on Brazilian rainforests and fires were taking off.
I wrote to Bunnings and complained. They got back to me and apologised. I said this stuff was so bad that it was not fit for purpose. I was also concerned about the fact that it came from Brazil but they assured me it was chosen from sustainable farming.
Working it was another matter. Even with sharp tools, this timber worked badly it was as though it was chunking, rather than cutting. Instead of fine sawdust, it produced small chips. It took nails and screws badly and I had to go a gauge or two bigger to be confident that the screws would even hold.
In conclusion, I would not buy from anywhere but a timber yard again but they are becoming rare. Whether they are price competitive or not kind of depends on the timber.
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