European Spruce (picea abies) has one of the highest stiffness-to-weight ratios of all the spruces. This stiffness contributes to the generally outstanding high-end performance from this wood. The species has outstanding damping characteristics. It has a good balance between stiffness, mass, and internal friction. European spruce's excellent properties remain undisputed.
* Norway Spruce
* White Spruce
* Scots Pine – More stable in humid environment. Preferred species in Japan for its
stability. A lot better than the domestic. Comes from bigger logs. Typically more stable
than Spruce. Structurally, when MSR testing the highest yields are coming from Scots
Pine. Stamp AS-SCP is Austrian Spruce - Scots Pine.
European Spruce Studs are straight with no cull resulting in virtually no callbacks.
* Use advanced kilns designed to provide technical drying to the required moisture content while having the capacity to dry large quantities of lumber.
* Employ mechanical strength grading of the used sawn timber for Glulam as well as solid wood panels done by 4 color scanners and mechanical strength tests. The result is a correlation of 90-94% in appearance and strength compared with 40-50 % in manual grading.


There have been some concerns over dealers hearing that the European Spruces don't span as well as domestic S-P-F. These claims are uneducated, misunderstood, or come from competitors fearful of losing customers to some of the highest lumber quality available.
If you look closely at the Design Values published by the CWC (Canadian Wood Council) for S-P-F you will see that they combine the values of No.1 & No.2. By combining the two you can use a method called rounding (round up or average). If you use rounding, you eliminate the term BASE (bottom) from the published values. The undisputed facts are that the European Spruces don't have large enough knot sizes that are near maximum for the grade so the test data has to be recalculated as though they do. The average reduction assigned for all European Spruce is 14.63%.
If the procedures are the same the following table reveals a comparison:
