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Silver Lake Home Center serves the White
Mountains and Lakes Region of Northern New Hampshire, including North
Conway, NH and Ossipee, NH.
Rt. 113 West |
Phone: Toll Free: Fax: |
603-367-8848 877-367-8848 603-367-8245 |
not bigger...better! |
CONTRACTORS |
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Silver Lake, NH 03875 |
European Spruce from Silver Lake Home Center Why use European Spruce for your lumber? 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. * Up to 25% lower cull rate. * Problem free sales * Highest quality image in your market * Pleasing appearance * Small Knot Size * Finer Grain * Less Twisting * Less Warping * Yards Better * Kiln Dried with Dehumidification Kilns yards longer and lacks moisture pockets that can - cause mold and premature deterioration. Species Mix European Spruces: * 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. Supply sources for European Spruce: * 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. |
SPR - The European Spruces have superior Structural Performance: 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: |
Further information is available by contacting the West Coast Lumber Inspection Bureau at (503) 639-0651 or visiting their website: www.wclib.org |
It’s important to understand that Design Values established by the different agencies are about methods used to calculate them. You can see by the previous examples that the science employed by the U.S WCLIB (West Coast Lumber Inspection Bureau) is very conservative and the fact is that BASE (bottom) Design Values are about minimum structural performance if lumber contains the maximum characteristics effecting their strength. European producers are not removing the upper grades from their No.2 and better grade, which accounts for the premium appearance. If the same techniques for rounding where employed by the WCLIB as the CWC, not suggesting BASE or bottom, the SPR published values would be much higher than S-P-F. Or if the CWC used the same methods as the WCLIB then arguably they would have to publish the BASE or bottom value contained in their shipments and given the broad range of species (see below) you can be certain that they would be much lower. Norway Spruce (picea abies) has one of the highest stiffness-to-weight ratios of all the spruces and its excellent properties remain undisputed. Pleasing appearance, small knot sizes, fine grain, less twist and less warp are some of the tangible benefits. Europeans have been building quality wood homes to last for centuries and Spruce is used more than any other species. Design professionals and builders who understand the difference between BASE and rounded values know the high value that is added to every structure built from European Spruce. |