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Home Improvement Chains Accused of False Advertising Over Lumber Dimensions (consumerist.com)
per unit analyzer writes: According to Consumerist, an attorney has filed a class-action lawsuit charging Home Depot (PDF) and Menards (PDF) with deceptive advertising practices by selling "lumber products that were falsely advertised and labeled as having product dimensions that were not the actual dimensions of the products sold." Now granted, this may be news to the novice DIYer, but overall most folks who are purchasing lumber at home improvement stores know that the so-called trade sizes don't match the actual dimensions of the lumber. Do retailers need to educate naive consumers about every aspect of the items they sell? (Especially industry quirks such as this...) Furthermore, as the article notes, it's hard to see how the plaintiffs have been damaged when these building materials are compatible with the construction of the purchaser's existing buildings. i.e., An "actual" 2x4 would not fit in a wall previously built with standard 2x4s -- selling the something as advertised would actually cause the purchaser more trouble in many cases.
If you buy a 20GB hard drive, you might only get one with 19GB of free space.
The size "2x4" is an industry standard since forever. I hope the assholes filing suit will be forced to pay the court costs when the suit is dismissed with prejudice.
I definitely overpaid for these two-penny nails!
If you post it, they will read.
If you were qualified to make a plan you'd know the actual dimensions of lumber.
Order rough cut. The dimensions are the dimensions after planing.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
These dimensions have been industry standards for 60 years or more (just addressing my own lifetime in that). All contractors know it, all architects know it. Anyone who works with lumber knows it. Those qualified to make plans, like architects, allow for the accepted sizes in their plans.
If you are actually expecting a 2x4 to be 2" x 4", then that tells us, right off, you have no idea what you're doing.
The problem is that when you use something like "2x4," a simple nomenclature that a 2nd grade potato could understand, the average non-potato person doesn't scratch their heads and google what "2x4" means. They say, "OH, this product is 2 by 4..." and they fill in inches because its the only reasobable unit that makes sense, looking at a 2x4.
Its easy to say, "Well duh, everyone should know that," when you know. But going into a field with the assumption that numbers don't mean the numbers they say isn't being cautious, it's being paranoid and insane- and maybe thats what the modern marketplace demands of consumers, but in my not so humble opinion, thats fucked up if it is.
I know fuckall about wood, but if I plan something where I use a 2x4, I used the dimensions 2x4xh on my plan, I want 2x4.
Right, for that you have to look up what the material is and get the dimensions from the datasheet. Or in the case of lumber, a website explaining the basics of it. You want 2"x4" and you go to the cabinet shop and they explain to you to buy 10/4 4s4 that is 4" wide and it will be 2 5/16", but they can plane it down for you for cheap/free. They might not have 10/4, you might have to choose between 8/4 which is 1 13/16" or 12/4 which is 2 13/16".
If it is 13/16" or thicker, then then it will be labeled in 4ths where 4/4 = 1" and describes the rough thickness before planing. But you can't get an exact thickness by buying it rough, because then it is rough and isn't exactly that thickness. It has to be planed to have exact dimensions. And then it is 3/16" thinner than the starting thickness. But sawmills don't cut anything less than 1", so you won't normally see 3/4 or anything like that, instead they would start from 4/4 and plane it all the way down and give you an exact measurement. So 1/2" is really exactly 1/2".
You aren't fucking with 2x4's anyways if you don't know anything about wood, because that is a specialty product for framing.
You can basically never design a physical item before you make it and not have to know anything about each material. Doesn't work.
You can always wait until after you have a pile of parts, measure them, examine their properties, and then design it without having had to actually learn anything. It might be harder to get the correct parts into the pile that way though, or to repeat the process and build 2 that are the same.
The vast majority of parts and materials are sized slightly larger or smaller than the printed size, which is actually a fitting size not the exact size of either side of the fitting. It is almost always greater than, less than, or started as before finishing.
Look the metric prefixes up: Giga, tera, etc are base 10. Giga means 10^9, not 2^30. They always have, they predated widespread base 2 usage. The standard SI prefixes are for base 10 as that's one of the big ideas behind the SI system is using base 10 for all units.
Now there are base-2 prefixes that have been introduced, those are Gibi, tebi and so on. If you want to talk base 2 orders of magnitude, you use those.
However using regular base-10 SI prefixes makes sense since basically everythign else in our computers uses that. When a processor says 3GHz it means 3 billion cycles per second, not 3,221,225,472. When a network is "gigabit" it means 10^9 bits per second, not 2^30. When we say DVDs are sampled at 48kHz we mean 48,000Hz not 49,152Hz. It makes sense to display our storage likewise. About the only area where the base-2 prefixes make sense is RAM, since it is actually sold along base-2 boundaries.
Look, I agree that 2x4 is a stupid name for a standard lumber dimension that is NOT 2" x 4". But nevertheless, THAT IS THE STANDARD. Home Depot didn't create the standard, and it is not their fault that it is stupid. But when 95% of people buy a 2x4, they understand that 2x4 is the tradename and not the precise dimensions. They want a standard 2x4, and that is exactly what Home Depot gives them.
If you want precise dimensions, then take along a ruler.
Then buy engineered "dimensional lumber" instead of standard builder-grade lumber.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
These boards are labeled 2x4s, not 2"-by-4"s. Your imagination is what injected the units into the final product.