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
