Wood as a building material
Due to the fact that the tree is widely used for all main and auxiliary buildings: on a personal plot, interior finishing work in the house, construction of auxiliary storage facilities, sheds, etc., therefore, you need to know something about its properties. Before you buy wood, you need to know its quality and what you can build from it.
Content
Coniferous wood
This wood is usually softer and lighter than most hardwoods, so it is easier to work with. During the construction, very often use coniferous wood such as pine, larch, spruce, fir. Spruce wood is used for almost all carpentry work.
Now there is always a spruce beam, spruce boards on sale. But remember that for outdoor work, spruce wood is treated with a special protective compound. Of course, you can simply apply an antiseptic solution on the surface of the wood with a brush, but it is better to buy wood impregnated under pressure, this method of impregnation allows the protective composition to penetrate deep into the wood. Spruce wood is easy to process, quite durable, suitable for painting or pickling with stain.
Pine is very often used in the construction of garden structures, its wood is very soft, but strong enough. During shrinkage, the pine warps a little, is well processed, painted and soaked.
This wood holds nails well, very hard, difficult to process, but it resists rot well. Larch is most suitable for the manufacture of outdoor structures, such as a gazebo, pergola, etc., is good for carving.
It should be borne in mind that larch during cracking can crack, so drying is required in compliance with all safety precautions.
What you need to know when buying wood
in this case, there is no black ring around the knot, small knots do not reduce the quality of the wood, but if tar oozes out of them, this can complicate its processing and decoration.
If cracks are located across the board, they weaken the wood.
Blue spots occur during the development of mold in coniferous wood. This affects the appearance, but if you scrape off the blue rot and treat it with an antiseptic, small spots do not affect the quality of the wood.
cracks along the length of the board
Cracks occur during quick drying, worsen the appearance, but do not greatly affect the quality of the board.
It is better not to take such boards, since deformation usually intensifies over time.
A black ring forms around the knot and the knot may fall out.
Hardwood
Trees such as oak, ash, beech have very hard wood. This wood is denser and harder than coniferous wood, it is heavy, resistant to decay, it has a denser structure, it looks more decorative than coniferous wood. But unlike pine and spruce wood, it is harder to process, and it costs a lot more.
From the family of oaks, the strongest and most durable oak is rocky, but it is expensive, it is difficult to process, but when screwing a screw and driving in nails, it can crack, so in order to avoid cracking the boards, it is necessary to drill holes first. Oak wood is often subjected to staining or pickling in order to give the wood a higher decorative quality. To stain the oak, the wood is kept in water for many years, after which it acquires a silky dark purple color. This increases the hardness of the wood, but at the same time increases its fragility.
The wood of this type of wood is not inferior in strength and hardness to oak, but is more susceptible to decay.
Ash wood is a bit like oak, but differs in color, its color is brownish-yellow, it is quite hard and viscous, as a result it is difficult to process, but it easily bends under steam, this property is used in the manufacture of arches, bent products. When drying, ash does not crack much, but in a humid environment it undergoes decay.
Wooden blanks
For household and garden buildings, usually use logs, they can be simple and rounded. When sawing logs along the entire length into two equal parts, half-logs, or plates, are obtained. Plates made of logs or simple, with a good selection, look good when sheathed arbors if they are nailed vertically. Of semi-logs magnificent floors turn out. Lumber for the construction of sheds, arbors, the manufacture of garden furniture can now be bought in the form of blanks, sometimes even in the form of a kit, the details of which only need to be assembled. However, true lovers - craftsmen for the manufacture of a wider range of products, purchase not calibrated lumber, the main evaluation criteria which are guided by the purchase;
is the size of lumber, the quality and moisture of the wood. Softwood lumber is usually sold with an indication of dimensions and measured in cubic meters. The standard thickness of the boards is from 10 to 80 mm., The standard width is from 100 to 150 mm. It should be understood that the final size may differ from that indicated, since the cheapest boards have the same surface as the electric saw left, so it needs to be planed, in addition, the boards can dry out during storage.
If you want your homesteads to have a beautiful appearance, buy better boards processed on the planer from all sides, since when processing on the machine, a layer of wood about 4 mm thick is removed. Since hardwood is expensive, it is hard to work with, it is less likely to be sold than softwood or spruce. Hardwood boards are usually sold milled from all sides, I have a width of 15 - 30 cm, and a thickness of 6 - 20 mm. Wooden boards made of such wood are on sale, usually their size is 2.5 meters by 1.25 meters.
As a rule, there are three types of lumber.
The cheapest. It is used for support beams, props, etc. The beam can have knots, it contains moisture about 20%, therefore, when dried, it can be deformed.
This lumber contains up to 15% moisture; it is usually used for do-it-yourself crafts.
This is the best material for carpentry, as it is processed on special machines, has a smooth surface, is used for interior and decoration work, experienced people try not to buy sawn boards from the outer parts of the log or from the middle of it, they select only seasoned material in the warehouse.
To increase strength, resistance to decay and prevent deformation, the wood must be dried. For this reason, in a dry, warm room or under a canopy, the boards are stacked in a stack, laying transverse rails between the rows every 1.5 meters, it is desirable to put something heavy, for example, bricks on the top layer. After two, three weeks the boards will dry out, torsional stress will disappear in them. Such boards are used for all garden work.
- plates are pressed from chips impregnated with resins and glue. There are many types of wood boards. Chipboards are not suitable for outdoor use.
-This sheets are 3-8 mm thick., There are low and high strength. These plates can be used for flooring, wall upholstery inside sheds and arbors, however, the plates must have water-repellent additives.
- plywood sheets are obtained by gluing veneer layers, these sheets are not so easily deformed and cracked, have the number of layers from 3 to 15, thickness from 3 to 25 mm. weather resistant plywood brands are available and are designed for outdoor decoration.
