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Concept
Lumber
Summary
Lumber is wood that has been processed into uniform and useful sizes (dimensional lumber), including beams and planks or boards. Lumber is mainly used for construction framing, as well as finishing (floors, wall panels, window frames). Lumber has many uses beyond home building. Lumber is sometimes referred to as timber in England, Australia and New Zealand, while in most parts of the world (including the United States and Canada) the term timber refers specifically to unprocessed wood fiber, such as cut logs or standing trees that have yet to be cut.
Lumber may be supplied either rough-sawn, or surfaced on one or more of its faces. Rough lumber is the raw material for furniture-making, and manufacture of other items requiring cutting and shaping. It is available in many species, including hardwoods and softwoods, such as white pine and red pine, because of their low cost.
Finished lumber is supplied in standard sizes, mostly for the construction industry – primarily softwood, from coniferous species, including pine, fir and spruce (collectively spruce-pine-fir), cedar, and hemlock, but also some hardwood, for high-grade flooring. It is more commonly made from softwood than hardwoods, and 80% of lumber comes from softwood.
In the United States and Canada, milled boards are called lumber, while timber describes standing or felled trees.
In contrast, in Britain, and some other Commonwealth nations and Ireland, the term timber is used in both senses. (In the UK, the word lumber is rarely used in relation to wood and has several other meanings.)
Timber recycling
Re-manufactured lumber is the result of secondary or tertiary processing of previously milled lumber. Specifically, it refers to lumber cut for industrial or wood-packaging use. Lumber is cut by ripsaw or resaw to create dimensions that are not usually processed by a primary sawmill.
Re-sawing is the splitting of hardwood or softwood lumber into two or more thinner pieces of full-length boards. For example, splitting a 2×4 () into two 1×4s () of the same length is considered re-sawing.
Official source
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