Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.