On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 01:03:09 -0600, Morris Dovey
wrote:

Is wood generally sold by the cubit foot?

Depends what sort of wood you're talking about.

Big stuff, odd trees, logs, waney edged boards, gets sold by the cubic
foot (12 board feet). There's a lot of "finger in the air" stuff
about how big a particular board measures out to be. Cube foot prices
are religiously observed with no haggling, but there's a big variation
in how a particular board measures up for wastage allowances,
depending on who you are, how well you know the seller and when you
last bought them a drink 8-)

For buying trees on a small scale (ie not whole woodlands), some
people still use the "Hoppus feet" measure. This takes a few
measurements off a tree and turns it into an estimated useful volume.
at the level I operate (pretty small) it's common to pass a load of
logs to the sawyer unmeasured, saw them up and then decide how big it
was, the sawyer taking a proportion of the useful timber. Because
we've had all our big native hardwood forests two hundred years ago,
we're often working with farm hedges and singletons. A lot of the
hardwood trees we saw today just aren't predictable for what they
yield, until they've been through the bandsaw.

Sawn stuff gets a price sticker stuck on the end and you measure a
length. No-one knows how that works. Our mass-market retail trade
sucks.

If sold in metric sizes, what are the most common nominal/actual
dimensions?

It's still sold in imperial sizes, they're just labelled in metric.
There's a lot of 19mm x 38mm around, although man-made sheets are in
funny-sized 2440 x 1220mm sheets (that's still 8'x4') but the
thickness is now exactly 10mm etc. rather than the old 3/8".

--
Smert' spamionam