On 30 Jun 2004 06:50:59 -0700, (Fred the Red
Shirt) vaguely proposed a theory
.......and in reply I say!:

remove ns from my header address to reply via email

hmmmmmmmmmm....and they all end up on the same shelf.

The hard stuff was a serious timber. I used to hunt it down each
weekend. $ for $ it _was_ value. now Pen.... pinus Radiata is the only
cheap wood..

God it's sad. 10 years ago I bemoaned the effort to pick up a few
pieces of really nice this or that. Now I don't have to...there is
none. The building trade used to grab the best jarrah. Now they all
use pine. in the most expensive houses theynuse properly seasoned,
dimensioned pine. The line between "quality" and "failure" gets
thinner.

I reckon in West Aust I should offer to reinstall all of the pergolas.
I would get some nice aged jarrah, and a lot of decent meranti. It had
poor rot resistance, but was used in some previous building boom. It
was a beautiful timber then, for internal use.

Sorry. But anyone that says there is not a disaster in the making need
only look to quality. It's the first to go. And that is not an
elitist, but a realist comment.

Look at English for instance. I started a sentence with and. G

Seriously, I was at the butcher's the other day, and we were joking
about being 21. The woman behind the counter sadi "Would you want to
be 21 again?" and I tried the old "Well if I knew then what I know
now" stuff. But she was serious. What's ahead?

Sorry, again.

There are hundreds of species of meranti ranging from some almost as
light and soft as balsa to others almost as hard and heavy as teak.

I was surprised to read here on rec.nahrm that lauan was sometimes
called 'white' mahogany since all the lauan plywood I had seen
was sort of a cocao color. Since then I have seen very pale
yellowish tan lauan locally. Lauan is a trade name for plywood
made from any of about 200 species of Asian/Pacific woods, mostly
from three genera of meranti.