Know Your Material

For your project, we need to consider the strength requirement, the weight of the material, and moisture content.

Strength Requirements/Sizing

Our species page describes the relative strengths. Essentially, the strength of coniferous timber is determined by how many years of growth (one ring per year) there are in a timber as well as the speed of growth. When a tree grows quickly the rings are wide and of course, when it is slow growing the rings are thin and close together. For Example, If you need to Structurally span 16ft for your ceiling beam, a Douglas Fir 8”x10” Timber would do it, whereas if Spruce (a softer and lighter weight wood) was used, the timber would need to be sized larger in order to have the strength required. When a project is decorative we need to plan for the weight of the timber as other framing needs to be able to support the weight.

Weight/Sizing

With structural strength and large sizing of timber members, comes weight.

When it comes to weight there are a few determining factors

1) Moisture content (The higher the moisture content, the heavier the wood will be)

2)Sizing (Obviously the bigger the sizing the heavier it will be)

3)Species (Species can vary greatly in weight)

Moisture Content

Wood Keeps Moving! Sometimes this is OK and sometimes it isn’t

When a tree is cut down or logged, it is wet- it is full of the water that allowed the tree to grow. Wood moves most in the initial stages of drying; when the cellular moisture leaves the wood. During natural drying, the cellular moisture slowly evaporates and with this, the wood shrinks and cracks and checks (timber language for a bigger crack in wood). Recently logged wood is termed “green” when it still contains cellular moisture.

The benefit of Recycled timber is that it is DRY. With our recycled timber; the trees were logged over 100 years ago and the timbers were shipped to Saskatchewan to construct the iconic Elevators. These timbers dried slowly and naturally in the perfect conditions. The cellular moisture is gone.

What all this boils down to is: If you are building a timber pergola, you may not need recycled, completely dry timber to start with, as the wood will always be exposed to extreme changes in humidity. If we are building you a set of stairs for the inside of your home, we will start with dry wood.

For our Live Edge inventory, we take advantage of the Saskatchewan climate to naturally dry the Slabs over time.

For example, this project combines structural and decorative pieces. We used solid Recycled Douglas Fir for the structural 11×11 posts. The homeowner had already installed drywall (without appropriate blocking). To easily install trusses in the style and sizing they wanted, we built these trusses as hollow trusses. We used SWAD Douglas Fir to mill the 1x material for the 7×7 hollow trusses. This method achieved the look they wanted and kept the trusses lightweight. For the beam seen on the right-hand side of the image, we used recycled Douglas Fir to do an 11×11 three-sided box beam. It was necessary to use dry and stable material for this large beam as it spanned 24ft. In short, we use a combination of materials working hard to find the strongest, most reliable, and cost-effective approach.