Spruce Pine Fir
Cutting cookies
- Thread starter Jasonrkba
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That sounds like trade jargon that we shouldn't be expected to know.
Whut's SPF?
Spruce pine fir, the most abundant trees in Canada’s boreal forest and the stuff that most of your high quality paper is made from. And softwood lumber.That sounds like trade jargon that we shouldn't be expected to know.
Whut's SPF?
Spruce pine fir, the most abundant trees in Canada’s boreal forest and the stuff that most of our high quality paper is made from. Softwood lumber too.
Bill G
ArboristSite King
It is like any trade there is simple jargon and some not so simple
Not every place follows the same jargon but here is some
S4S....surfaced four sides...straight lined and planed
S2S...surfaced two sides....planed on the flats, not straight lined
Rough...as it came off the mill and out of the kiln..no surfacing
Skip planed......top and bottom have been through the planer once but not flat
FAS....first and seconds. A quality grade
These depend on surfacing. Just like a 2x4 is not 2x4
4/4....15/16 thick
5/4....1 1/8 thick
6/4....1 1 3/8 thick
Random....not sorting to width and length
3-4-5's....... the junk ends/sections that are cut out of quality boards and the range in lengths from 3 to 5 ft.
I actually work at the sawmill in Ear Falls. Years ago in the Avenor and Weyerhaeuser days they were under the same ownership. I worked at the mill in Hudson 20 years ago when I first moved out here as well.
Cookies ain't much good for anything structural (like a table), even if they don't crack all to hell -- and usually they do. The problem is that even if they don't crack, the grain all goes the wrong way. Think about how much easier it is to split firewood along the grain than across (perpendicular to) the grain. There's very little strength (tensile or compressive) between the layers of grain compared to the strength "with the grain," even after the wood's moisture level has reached equilibrium with the environment.
Only way I've gotten cookies not to crack is by waiting 3-5 years before cutting cookies out of a log. I recently cut up a big white oak that had been blown over for 4 years or more, and I cut a cookie about 1.5" x 18" diameter and it didn't crack even after I brought it into the house. I may end up making a clock or something like that out of it.
If you're cutting cookies out of green wood, you might be able to immediately put the cookie into some ethylene glycol anti-freeze and then seal it up in a big bag for a while, and then sloooooooooly let it dry out. (That's what they do when they find old submerged boats and other wooden artifacts that they want to dry out to display in museums. Plain old water would also work, but the problem is that if you used water and then dried it out as slowly as you need to, it would dry-rot into nothing before it ever dried. Anti-freeze kills dry-rot fungus sprores, as well as pretty much every other living thing on Earth.)
Differential drying is what causes the cracking -- the end grain dries & shrinks while the core is still wet and expanded, so all it can do is crack -- which is why it's good to put paint or Anchorseal on the end grain of freshly milled green boards. That helps, but doesn't entirely stop checking. Water gets where it wants to go. All you can do is slow it down some.
Only way I've gotten cookies not to crack is by waiting 3-5 years before cutting cookies out of a log. I recently cut up a big white oak that had been blown over for 4 years or more, and I cut a cookie about 1.5" x 18" diameter and it didn't crack even after I brought it into the house. I may end up making a clock or something like that out of it.
If you're cutting cookies out of green wood, you might be able to immediately put the cookie into some ethylene glycol anti-freeze and then seal it up in a big bag for a while, and then sloooooooooly let it dry out. (That's what they do when they find old submerged boats and other wooden artifacts that they want to dry out to display in museums. Plain old water would also work, but the problem is that if you used water and then dried it out as slowly as you need to, it would dry-rot into nothing before it ever dried. Anti-freeze kills dry-rot fungus sprores, as well as pretty much every other living thing on Earth.)
Differential drying is what causes the cracking -- the end grain dries & shrinks while the core is still wet and expanded, so all it can do is crack -- which is why it's good to put paint or Anchorseal on the end grain of freshly milled green boards. That helps, but doesn't entirely stop checking. Water gets where it wants to go. All you can do is slow it down some.
I've only ever worked in stud mills, Skip planed is a new one on me. Skip as in a defect where the planer heads lost contact with the board I am very familiar with(Got my grading liscence in 2004, all of my years in mills until the last year in the electrical department have been planer side) as well as just about every other defect... LOL
Some did. We wait until they dry some and we use the best ones.
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Bill G
ArboristSite King
Well there is no doubt a stud mill is completely different than a hardwood mill. One is no better than the other just a different operation. You fine folks are producing a 100% uniform product. That is the beauty of your business, It makes building so much easier and thankfully so. Here the hardwood mills will "skip plane" lumber which means it goes through the planer once and the top and bottom are "hit" once. That does not mean the entire surface is cleaned up , especially on a wide or heavily cupped board. The planer might "skip" sections leaving un-planed areas. I hope that makes sense.
On a side note many years ago when my brother and I were looking to buy a higher speed planer I found an old Yates-American that was supposed to have came from a softwood mill in the PNW. It was advertised as running at 1200 feet per minute. Well folks 1200FPM is lightning quick. Needless to say we passed on it
We called it "Hit or Miss" planing. Not totally down to finished thickness.
I definitely would like to have the chance to spend some time in a random mill, or a hardwood mill. Even the two stud mills I have worked in were vastly different in scale and technology, this one was built in the 90's, the other, the original Yates planer is from 1948, and still has a flat belt on the drive.
We had the Yates and 2 1954 Stetson Ross planers over there. We averaged somewhere around a million FBM per 10 hour shift, all hand graded. 2x4x8 premium Record when I was there was 1.5 out the door to be shipped, 1.8 through the mill.
My current mill only has a single Neuman Ross planer. Shift target on 2x4x8 is 380,000fbm. Record under the current ownership with the autograding system is a hair over 500k.
1200fpm doesn't sound like that big of a number until you do the math, that's a solid 150 boards per minute on 8', and by the time you add in some extra speed from the pineapples, you will probably touch 158ish with the planer feed rolls set to 1200. We usually shoot for 163-165, but I had pushed it as high as 173 when operating infeed myself when I was still lead hand. That's getting into the law of deminishing returns though, and leaves little leeway for a skew on the outfeed side being a minor event and not a few minutes of downtime because it quickly turned into a giant pile...
If this thread had rails, we definitely are no longer on them
We had the Yates and 2 1954 Stetson Ross planers over there. We averaged somewhere around a million FBM per 10 hour shift, all hand graded. 2x4x8 premium Record when I was there was 1.5 out the door to be shipped, 1.8 through the mill.
My current mill only has a single Neuman Ross planer. Shift target on 2x4x8 is 380,000fbm. Record under the current ownership with the autograding system is a hair over 500k.
1200fpm doesn't sound like that big of a number until you do the math, that's a solid 150 boards per minute on 8', and by the time you add in some extra speed from the pineapples, you will probably touch 158ish with the planer feed rolls set to 1200. We usually shoot for 163-165, but I had pushed it as high as 173 when operating infeed myself when I was still lead hand. That's getting into the law of deminishing returns though, and leaves little leeway for a skew on the outfeed side being a minor event and not a few minutes of downtime because it quickly turned into a giant pile...
If this thread had rails, we definitely are no longer on them
Bill G
ArboristSite King
That is it exactly. Just a bit of different jargon but is the exact same concept.
