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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.
I thought it was normal for a 2x4 to actually measure 1.5x3.5 because of the planing that happens or somesuch.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
Every few years some ambulance chaser tries this bullshit in the US. All over the world timber is sold using the undressed dimensions, it's been that way since the dead sea caught the sniffles. IMO the court should declare the suit frivolous and force him to refund the money (with interest) to the people who have joined his class action con job.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The dimensions of the timber are based on the rough sawn dimensions. Most timber you buy from the store has been subsequently "dressed" or planed to a smooth and more importantly uniform finish.
This is well known to anyone buying timber and has been like this for over a century.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
lying about the size of their wood ;)
I was at a store in the Lowes chain recently and noticed that at each lumber rack were the actual dimensions of the wood. Nowhere was the traditional '2X4' label used. Just to be sure I measured some samples and though my measurements were slightly different, the label was mostly correct.
As someone mentioned, long ago a 2X4 was a 2X4. If you see one from an old structure, you will note that its surface is very rough and dangerous to delicate hands. Our modern lumber is smooth and attractive to see and feel. Exactly the result you would have if you smoothed the old lumber. The smoothness is a result of planing and carefully hand sanding each piece for customer satisfaction. Of course the dimensions are slightly reduced, but which would you rather have?
I asked my brother in Brasil about lumber sizing "do they use metric?". He replied with some confusion; he said that it depends on where you buy your lumber. Different outlets will have different sizes and those could change depending on their current sources. He built his own house out in the distant suburbs of Sao Paulo using such materials. There seems to be no standard there.
...omphaloskepsis often...
In fact, here's some linkies:
From the NIST (PDF)
American Softwood Lumbar Standards - Voluntary Product Standard DOC PS 20â"99
More from the NIST (HTML)
Title: Making Sure that Lumber Measures Up
I don't really think one needs to go much farther...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Nominal sizes are indeed standardized in the US and Canada, so this case is without merit. Building with true dimensional lumber is a huge pain anyways. Rough cut lumber is just that, rough, and you'll be picking slivers out half the day. And then the guy that buys your house in 20 years has to replace a stud or a joists, and realizes he can't just go to the local lumber yard and pick up what he needs, but has to order custom cut or find someone with a mill
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I did some work on a place I had that was built sometime in the 60s, and in redoing bits of floor I found that the plywood that was used previously was a true 1/2" but when I went to HD to buy half-inch ply, it wound up being more like 27/64ths or something like that.
Enough of a difference to be annoying.
It doesn't work as an implied unit. Otherwise you could glue a pair of 2x4s and make a 4x4 - which obviously doesn't work.
Metric is the solution :D
Metric is a problem. For anybody who frets about metric. Not so big of a problem for the rest of us who don't really care.
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.
Yeah, plumbing is not for the feint of heart or slow witted. Pipe sizes are - in theory - the inside diameter (tubing sizes are the outside diameter), but when working with pipe and pipe fittings, it is the outside diameter that matters. And the sizes were set many, many years ago, when manufacturing costs were cheap, and stuff was made to last several lifetimes. In short, the wall of the pipe was a hell of a lot thicker then. Even today, you get multiple schedules of pipe, from 40 (which today is sorta standard for quality work) to 80 or even higher - the higher the number, the thicker the wall, the more pressure it can hold. But the outside diameter has to be the same on all sizes. (Copper pipe, of course, has a thinner wall than steel or plastic, and thus has "types" - M, L or K - instead of "schedules", but the principle is the same. Type M is such thin shit you can blow a hole in it by peeing real hard, type K will hold the weight of a mountain.)
And people wonder why plumbers make more than doctors.
Back in the 1800s, when you bought a "2x4" from the lumber mill it was green and "rough". That means it had too much moisture content to be used right away, it almost certainly twisted significantly along its length, and was pretty far from rectangular in its cross section. But that cross section was at least two inches by four inches.
So lumber wasn't sold ready to use. What you did was you stacked it in your barn for a few months to dry out, then if you needed an accurate shape you'd run the board through a jointer-planer to produce smooth, precise, parallel surfaces. Both these operations reduce the dimensions of the finished lumber.
By the early 20th century lumber mills started doing all this work for you so you could buy a 2x4 board and use it the same day. Far from cheating the customer as you claim, they're actually adding value by curing it and milling it down to a standard shape. Since 1924 the standard has been that 2 inches rough-hewn is always planed down to 1.5 inches; 4 to 3.5; 8 to 7.25, 10 to 9.25 and 12 to 11.25. But if you went to the lumber mill with a tape measure, you'd see that the 1.5 x 3.5 finished boards indeed start their life as 2 x 4 inch rough boards.
If you think about it, a lumber mill that cheated its customers on dimension would go out of business fast. You'd lay out your project, figure out how many boards you'd need, and not only would you come up short, nothing would fit as expected. The whole point of milling the softwood lumber to a standardized dimension is that you could plan out your material requirements exactly and then buy exactly what you need, when you need it.
Given that the dimensions of finished softwood lumber have been set by national standards for the last 90 years, I'm guessing the lawyer who brought the suit is either an idiot or is looking for a quick nuisance payoff.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The practice of making smoothed wood 1/4 inch smaller than the nominal size started some time after 1870. The first national standard was set it 1924 and has been revised several times. https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/misc/miscpub_6409.pdf
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If you really need full sized lumber, you're probably going to have to go directly to a sawmill. My family was in the wood products business when I was growing up. We had a sawmill, but it was mostly to supply our own needs for other products. We were willing to sell rough cut, full sized lumber to people however.
It's going to have to be small business though. A big sawmill operation, like the types who would be supplying Home Depot aren't going to pull half a dozen pieces out of their operation for you, but there are still small operations around serving niche markets.
As far back as I can remember, the advertised dimensions have meant the cut size. You lose 1/4" on each side by planing. I'm not sure when they started planing everything headed to the retail market. Probably in the late '60's or sometime in the '70s. I've seen houses built in the 1960s which had rough wall studs, but in 30+ years, except for our own small business, I don't think I've ever seen rough lumber for retail sale.