JLC • NEW ENGLAND EDITION • NOVEMBER 1994
Waning Lumber Quality?
To the Editor:
Stud grade lumber has a lot of wane
these days. Why? I recently remodeled
a 20-year-old house, and not one piece
of lumber had wane. When did they
change the specs?
Robert Muzzy
Athol, Mass.
Chris Donnelly responds:
The grading criteria for dimension lumber
have remained virtually unchanged
since 1970, when the National Grade
Rule for dimension lumber was adopted.
The amount of wane that is acceptable in
the grade today was acceptable back in the
'70s. What, then, has changed?
The answer, simply put, is the resource.
Twenty years ago, the industry was geared
more to the use of large trees. Individually,
these trees allowed for