Comments by "Paul Frederick" (@1pcfred) on "" video.

In a nutshell the old timers got here first and they took all the best wood for themselves. I was working on a 200 year old building once and I saw boards 20 feet long and a foot wide that were perfectly clear. Not so much as a pin knot in any of it and the grain was as straight as laser beams. It looked like something from another planet it was so perfect. It was beyond reproach. That kind of wood simply doesn't exist anywhere today. The wood of dreams.
3900
@DIYwithDave that's the only time and place I ever saw wood like that. It didn't look like it came from this planet. It was impossibly perfect. I had to chainsaw all of it up and throw it down a garbage chute too. We were working on a school and lowering it off the scaffolding simply was not an option. It had to go down contained inside the chute. That was the job. But it had mill stamps on it. That building was 170 years old then and that was over 30 years ago now. It's on the national registry. It held up the cornices of the nun's school in Convent Station. Saint Elizabeth's university. We ripped down the old stuff and replaced it with fiberglass simulations. But that wood underneath was still perfect. That's what they used for nailers. It was nailed to the brick and then the cornices were nailed to it. The rest of the old woodwork was in bad shape. I still have one of the rosettes off of it.
261
@DanielinLaTuna you can't use salvage wood in new construction though. I'm not sure it could be graded due to its age.
50
@DanielinLaTuna when you read the code there's a lot of rules but it also says the inspector has final say. So if the inspector likes it you're good. If he doesn't you have to make any alterations they say. That's the long and short of it. Woe to anyone that argues with an inspector too. There's no scenario where that's going to get you anything besides trouble.
20
@tuberNunya there's no difference there today. They're both two sides of the same coin.
14
@Charon-5582 and it'll get wet unevenly. That's what'll really twist it up. One side expands and that bends the wood. Sometimes you can take a bend out by wetting the other side. It isn't 100% or easily controllable though.
7
@johnhess351 this is a first come first serve world we live in. They got here before we did too. The world's oceans are pretty much fished out at this point too. A lot has been used up.
5
@lway8545 is takes hundreds of years to grow large trees with tight grain. It's simple arithmetic. If a tight ring is a sixteenth of an inch then it takes 16 years to grow one inch in radius. Now we can calculate how big that tree would be after 200 years. It'd be 25 inches in diameter. That's how much tree you get in hundreds of years of growth.
3
@MyDogmatix at the rate things are at now we're going to have to figure out how to grow wood in a lab. It ain't getting any better. Every day it just gets worse. Woodworking is going the way of the buggy whip maker.
3
Actually if you get to the bottom of the spotted owl issue Enron was behind it. They ended up selling the Headwaters to the government for an incredible amount of money. They probably hired the environmentalists to protest. They were likely just actors. It was a huge scam. Around that time they were also clear cutting and causing mud slides. If you remember around then mudslides were all over the news. So that was them too. Oh and the brownouts. They engineered those too. A few bad people can do a lot of damage.
2
@SaanMigwell Trees are renewable but it takes hundreds to thousands of year. I'm not going to live that long myself. In fairly short order we've managed to cut down virtually all the old growth forest on the entire planet. It's all gone now. It won't come back for a very long time, if ever. We'll certainly never see it. That's reality.
2
@brianelliot2719 tariffs are not profits that anyone collects. The only people getting fat and happy with tariffs are governments. A tariff is a fee a government imposes on imports. The purchaser pays that money to the government. Supposedly tariffs are protectionist. But that's not what the end result always is.
2
@utej.k.bemsel4777 we have more trees than ever. They're just not very good trees. We do try to fight forest fires. For decades those efforts have gained woodland. We have quantity now but no quality. There's an argument that our zero burn policy has caused more wildfires too. Because we've just let fuel stack up. So when there are forest fires they're more intense now. So we're trying to do more controlled burns. That doesn't always go well.
2
@frankr5207 they don't exist in a commercially viable state. There may be trees here and there today. But that's not how anyone logs at scale. I watched a video of them logging the redwoods and it was crazy. They didn't even have chainsaws. They were cutting them down with axes and two man saws. Trees 8 and 10 feet in diameter.
2
@lway8545 the only thing I'm a victim of is your silliness.
2
@Nick-b7b9s wood is an excellent material. So much so we've used all the good wood up. But we'll manage with what we've got left.
2
@Nick-b7b9s wood is a material we cannot equal. Although we've been trying. The need has never been greater either. Someone should figure out how to grow wood in a lab. I guess food is pretty important too though. I don't think we've been doing too good there either so far.
2
@nolesfan8900 yeah the 1920s was a very different world than the world we live in today. The chainsaw hadn't been invented yet. So all of that wood was harveted by hand. Artesian style. They didn't have jobsite power tools either. So they did the carpentry the old fashioned way too. I replaced a wooden piece on a wheelbarrow the other day and lamented the piece I used had a knot in it. But it only took a couple minutes to make on the table saw so if it breaks no big deal. I don't have that much work into it really. I ripped it out of a scrap piece of 2x4 I had laying around. But that's the quality of modern wood these days. It's hard to avoid defects.
2
@DIYwithDave no it was about ripping the government off. I forget exactly what Enron got for the Headwaters but it was an obscene amount of cash. For what basically amounted to a swamp. I can't find any info about it today because the noise level is too high about the government's latest lunatic plan to save the failed species. Now they're going to kill all the other owls that are competing with it. Equity at any cost!
1
If you look into the spotted owl thing a bit you'll find Enron was behind it. All the mudslides in California and the blackouts, it was Enron. They were wrapped up in that whole Headwaters thing. Besides being an energy company they were involved with lumber too. That scam they ran was epic. They sold the land to the government for an ungodly sum.
1
@eg8475 what statement do you find stupid? You think we haven't logged all the old growth forest? Perhaps you should look into all of this a bit more.
1
@_Circus_Clapped_ more time than I've got. It takes hundreds of years to grow large desirable trees. Trees with tight growth rings. Every two lines is one year. Summer and winter wood. I don't think I have an inch left in me at this point.
1
@othername1000 are you sure about that? Because there's illegal logging going on there. If it was so full of good stuff I don't think folks would be taking chances. That good stuff is owned by tribes. They're not interested in your worthless paper either.
1
@viracocha03 this was no general job. The building is a national landmark and an active religious school. So we had no options. All debris had to come down off the scaffold in the garbage chute. Put convent station saint elizabeth into a search engine and click on the image link. We were right up under the eaves replacing the cornices. That's a fair ways up. 80 feet? You do not want to drop something from there and hit some little angel that goes to that school. Because if you do you're going straight to Hell. I did see an adult angel there. I don't know who she was but one of the most beautiful women I've seen in my entire life. We all practically fell off the scaffolding every time she came by. So hot. An absolute vision. She's got to be old now. But damn. One of those statuesque blondes. She should have been a model. God smiled on her. So yeah not the kind of people you want to put at risk.
1
@lobdsk don't be influenced by survivor bias. Anything that lasts 200 years is an exceptional example. Plenty didn't last but we cannot see any of it today. So that can give the false impression that everything from the past must have been good by examining whatever has survived.
1
@DedicatedSpartan it isn't something I am extremely knowledgeable about but I have heard that we've developed science and technology in ways that have aided us in mining. We've developed tech that's helped us cut trees down more efficiently too for that matter. But even with hand tools we were still very good at it. We didn't need any fancy tech to find trees either. So we just managed to take tree harvesting to a higher level than mining sooner. As a species we've had a greater affinity with trees than minerals for longer. Our ancestors used to live in trees after all. In a way a lot of us still do today. We just chop those trees down and rearrange them.
1
@Cleettheclap it doesn't exist as a mass market commodity today. No one said it doesn't exist at all. What I'm saying is high quality wood used to be the norm, not the exception. We can cut all the 500 year old trees down very quickly. Then it takes 500 years to replace them all. We have rapidly harvested the vast majority of that old timber. 1992 was 500 years from when Columbus landed in the New World.
1
@angryanne I think baby trees are referred to as saplings.
1
@samuellourenco1050 there was no way to get it down from where it was safely intact. When you're working on an open school your options are extremely limited then. No wood is worth risking the safety of others over. We did what we had to do. What we were being paid to do.
1
@Dopamine1245 if it is unobtainable in an affordable manner then it effectively no longer exists in a practical sense. High quality wood was once so common that's all anyone used for anything. What we're using today the old timers wouldn't have bothered splitting for firewood. They wouldn't have even burned it. The boards I saw they used as hidden nailers and it was fantastic stuff.
1
@tomorrow6 the owl had nothing to do with it and habitat isn't why it's going extinct either. Now the government has another hair brained scheme where they're going to kill a half a million owls to try to save that one owl. The schemers at Enron were just very clever individuals. The Headwaters deal was one of the most lucrative scams in history.
1
@hed1fsu less than 1% of old growth remains today.
1
@aigarsjevers1274 there's no scientific evidence to support the claim that humans are warming the planet. The planet has been warming since the end of the last ice age. That's roughly 12,000 years ago.
1
@PatrioticAmerican-d6h we have 1% of old growth forest left today. We cut the other 99% down already. So a lot of what's left exists now because it is protected today. If it wasn't it'd be gone too.
1
@PatrioticAmerican-d6h not old growth there isn't. There's 1% left of what there once was.
1
@PatrioticAmerican-d6h they're probably not as old as you seem to think they are.
1
@PatrioticAmerican-d6h so a bit more than a quarter? How about that. In less than two centuries we've managed to consume three quarters of a thousand years of growth. That's sustainable! I guess we're doing better than Easter Island. We are locusts.
1
@Ozone814 they were using what they had and that's all there was. So they took it all for themselves and used it all up too. How long do you think it takes a 300 year old tree to grow?
1
@DeuceAlchemist many things share similarities between each other. Very few things are exactly alike though. In a week we should see some changes. The climate is already changing. The social climate, that is.
1
@DeuceAlchemist a lot's changed in the past 100 years. I'm sure that wood you're saving has changed itself too. 1925 was a long time ago now. The world was a much different place then. It was even different when I was growing up.
1
@Proconst1 you're not getting wood like I saw today for any amount of money. It simply no longer exists. Those boards were a foot wide and 20 feet long without a single defect in any of them. The grain wasn't even a little wavy. If I hadn't seen it I wouldn't even have imagined it was possible. It looked like wood that grew on another planet. Fantasyland. Seeing is believing though. Those trees were felled over 200 years ago now though. That wood had been there 185 years when I saw it. That was over 25 years ago now. So they did come from another planet. A world we'll never know.
1
@richtomlinson7090 softwood and hardwood classifications depends on whether trees have needles or leaves. It really has nothing to do with the janka hardness of the wood itself. Some of the softest woods are classified as hardwoods. Which is a bit misleading I suppose. But most of the scale does go how one would suppose it does. With softwoods being softer than hardwoods are.
1