Re: Europe lumber question
Sgian Dubh
"If you get an "oridnary" sized board sawed in Europe how is it different from what would be imported from US which?"
Measure and practice are essentially the same during milling. Whereas in the US logs are sawn to yield after drying common thicknesses of, for example, 1", 2", 3", boards, and some increments in between such 1-1/4", in Europe equivalent metric measurements are the target, i.e., 25, 50, 75 mm and 32 mm (~1-1/4") after drying.
"How would the US board be measured for sale in Europe, given that it was produced and measured for export in bdft?"
Measuring for the sale of sawn boards is the same, i.e., Length X Width X Thickness, except the measurements are taken in metric. This typically applies when a smaller purchase is made, e.g., say ten or fifteen pieces of a hardwood to make a cabinet or a table.
If a woodworking company buys a complete banded and wrapped package of an American sawn hardwood through their wood merchant, it's generally sold in metric measure, no matter what measure the US exporter invoices the wood merchant. It's a simple sum to convert from bdft to m³, and no doubt the wood merchant has the conversion buried in a spread sheet. bdft/~424 = m³, e.g., 12,000 bdft/424 = 28.30 m³. The actual conversion factor is 423.74 to just two decimal places.
Similar to the US, machined wood, much of which is now described as 'regularised', such as stuff either sawn or planed to common sizes, such as 2 X 6 sawn, or 2 X 6 nominal prior to planing are sold as 50 X 150 mm nominal (or sawn) is sold by the linear metre, the equivalent of the linear foot. Typically, lengths of such material come in increments of 300 mm, which you'll notice is very close to 1ft. So, material is cut to lengths such as 2.1 m (a bit shy of 7') then go up incrementally to numbers like 3.2 m (~10-1/2 feet) or 4.8 m (a bit shy of 16 feet). Sale by linear metre is also the practice for machined standard mouldings, e.g., skirting board, architrave, floor boards, V-groove and ship-lap cladding, and so on.
Well, that's what happens here in the UK, and it may be a bit different in continental Europe. But you still come across UK merchants that can work in cubic feet (we don't use bdft at all), and most UK woodworkers and merchants are pretty adept at switching reasonably seamlessly between metric and Imperial measure. For instance, making a fairly typical table might need something like 7 - 10 ft³ of rough sawn wood (84 - 120 bdft), and I can pretty much instantly convert that to ~0.25 m³ because I carry in my head the conversion factor of 36 ft³ per 1 m³ - the actual conversion factor is 35.31, but 36 is close enough for a quick mental calculation. Slainte.
