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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 definitely overpaid for these two-penny nails!
If you post it, they will read.
I thought it was normal for a 2x4 to actually measure 1.5x3.5 because of the planing that happens or somesuch.
Indeed. If a 2x4 was actually 2"x4" that would be deceptive, because it would not be a standard 2x4 and would not fit in standard framing. If I buy a 2x4, I want it to be 1.5x3.5, nothing more, nothing less.
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 ;)
It is, and it's obvious the lawsuit will fail. Most judges probably know that a 2x4 is 1.5x3.5. Next someone will sue because the sweater they bought doesn't sweat.
I'll sue the condom manufacturer who suggested I would get to experience safe sex with my purchase.
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."
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.
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.
It actually is. You might not be aware of this, but your average 2x4 contains 1,000,000,000,000% of your recommended daily fiber intake. Uncomfortable going in is an understatement, and incomprehensibly hard coming out.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
These dimensions have been industry standards for 60 years or more ...
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.
I'm remodeling a house right now (today, not this very second.) It has 2x4s. TWO by FOURS. It has support beams placed every 4 feet. (Not 3.5', and not 8'.) It was built in 1895, so there's the other side of the redefinition bracket.
A few helpers have remarked, "This is an actual 2x4. Wow, you don't see that every day -- how about that!"
The timber industry (or home repair? Who??) decades ago redefined the size. They shouldn't have but they did, and nobody cared to call them on it. Too late now.
They should try something more productive, like fixing "Unimited Usage" advertised by ISPs and Wireless Carriers. I'm sure they'll have more success.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
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.
The timber industry (or home repair? Who??) decades ago redefined the size
They didn't redefine the meaning, they simply defined it in the first place. Before that standard, a finished 2x4 came in all sorts of different sizes. For many places you the size was for the green lumber, which meant it changed after being dried and again when surfaced. Other places the size was after drying, but before surfacing (you see this a lot in older homes with rough cut studs). It was often not even consistent from the same mill when they did a bad job of measuring moisture levels before drying, and just cut everything to the same size. Sometimes this mean ripping studs on site for construction (again, how you sometimes get actual 2x4 dimensions at old homes).
The standard size came later when technology improved such that quick and cheap measuring of moisture made it efficient to get the green sizing correct and to not waste much when planing to a standard size.
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.
Then buy engineered "dimensional lumber" instead of standard builder-grade lumber.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I just checked Home Depot's website and in the product overview for a framing 2x4 it gives the following information:
Common: 2 in. x 4 in. x 8 ft.; Actual: 1.5 in. x 3.5 in. x 96 in.
Lowes, Menard's, and all the other stores of this type say the same thing. Nobody is lying about what they're selling. This lawsuit is the epitome of frivolous lawsuits and should be thrown out the first day.
These boards are labeled 2x4s, not 2"-by-4"s. Your imagination is what injected the units into the final product.
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.
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