Skip to main content

Two-by-fours are not actually 2-by-4—here’s why

[ad_1]


There’s an entire subgenre of American humor derived from carefully placing the punchline into the question itself. For example, the answer to the legendary not-joke “Who’s buried at Grant’s Tomb?” is, quite obviously, “Grant.”



You’d be forgiven, then, for answering the question “What size is a 2-by-4?” with “2 inches by 4 inches.” But it turns out, you’d be answering this particular riddle wrong. Two-by-fours are actually 1.5-by-3.5s. The same is true for most other wood cuts, which are all systematically smaller than their names would suggest. Here’s why.


“Two by four is a colloquialism,” says Mark Stephens, the vice president of Woodworkers Source, an Arizona-based company. The phrase 2-by-4 “rolls off your tongue a helluva lot easier” than the truth, he says. But the origins of the 2-by-4 are more complicated than an old-timey lumberjack deciding to round up.



To create a beam or plank of wood, one must start by chopping down a tree. “And then you cut that tree up into chunks” called cants, according to Stephens. “[A tree] is round, but saws cut straight,” Stephens continues. “A cant is the biggest piece you can get out of a log.”



Those cants, just moments ago part of a living tree, are moist. And moist wood—called “green lumber”—is prone to bending and warping. It’s also likely full of bugs. So lumber producers season their wood. A typical planks is air dried on site, cut up into boards and dried again. Sometimes, the material is run through a wood kiln. Softwoods like pine, which is common for beams and planks, are baked below 240 degrees.



This drying effect isn’t permanent. Wood is hygroscopic, so it adjusts its internal moisture to match the external moisture of its environment. But, Stephens says, “drying gets a lot of those problems out of the way.” By speeding up the process, manufacturers cut down the time it takes to turn a tree into a plank. What's more, by accelerating a piece of wood’s natural warping process, the lumber industry can deal with any inconsistencies before it gets to you, the consumer. Additionally, heating helps to remove bugs and other detritus.



Through the drying process, the boards naturally shrink, as moisture leaves the beams. The real shrinkage, however, comes when the “rough-sawn material” is sent to a planer, which rubs the surface of the wood down into the smooth shapes you can purchase at a hardware store. Without the rough edges, what went in as a 2-by-4 planks of rough-sawn wood is now a tongue-tripping 1.5-by-3.5, having lost approximately ¼-inch on all sides to the planer and drying processes. “Once upon a time, 2-by-4s really were 2 inches by 4 inches,” Stephens says. But these days, the blocks are smaller, prettier, and hopefully a little more environmentally resilient by the time they're up for sale.


The 2-by-4 moniker is certainly a misnomer, but the implications are negligible. While our popular lexicon hasn’t caught up (and probably never will), the legislation regulating wood certainly has.



Back in the 1920s, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover began pushing for the first American wood sizing regulations. Previously, wood sizes were determined locally, so the mishmash of rules meant a builder might not be purchasing the same length plank if one batch came from Maine, another from Minnesota. But Hoover’s standards were enacted nearly a century ago and refined over the intervening decades. Plus, it's certainly in the best interest of large companies like Home Depot and Lowe's to maintain standards across all of their stores.



So don't fret. The next bundle of 2-by-4s you pick up in the hardware store are certain to be the exact same size: 1.5-by-3.5 inches.




[ad_2]

Written By Eleanor Cummins

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Humans flourished through a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago (so you can make it through Tuesday)

[ad_1] About 74,000 years ago, a large chunk of a Pacific island exploded. It sent ash and other debris around the world, including to the southern tip of Africa, where it would be found by a team of international scientists and entered as the latest data point in one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology ( I know ): Did the Toba supervolcano thrust our planet into a 1,000-year volcanic winter, thus bottle-necking animals and plants alike? Or was it just a little blip on our historic radar? That’s the contentious arena into which our intrepid researchers venture, this time with a new study in Nature establishing that humans in modern-day South Africa not only survived, but flourished after the Toba eruption. Where once was (we think, maybe) a mountain, there is now a huge caldera with a lake inside, and an island inside that. Their evidence shows that debris from the explosion landed 9,000 kilometers (5592.3 miles) away, the farthest distance traveled ever recorded for the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they're too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys.

[ad_1] John Gluck’s excitement about studying parent-child separation quickly soured. He’d been thrilled to arrive at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s, his spot in the lab of renowned behavioral psychologist Harry Harlow secure. Harlow had cemented his legacy more than a decade earlier when his experiments showed the devastating effects of broken parent-child bonds in rhesus monkeys. As a graduate student researcher, Gluck would use Harlow’s monkey colony to study the impact of such disruption on intellectual ability. Gluck found academic success, and stayed in touch with Harlow long after graduation. His mentor even sent Gluck monkeys to use in his own laboratory. But in the three years Gluck spent with Harlow—and the subsequent three decades he spent as a leading animal researcher in his own right—his concern for the well-being of his former test subjects overshadowed his enthusiasm for animal research. Separating parent and child,...
Post a Comment
Read more