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Fiddlesticks. Redwoods are a fabulous building material. If you’re in the Bay Area, go check your houses joists. Quite a number of old houses here are made of
by api_or_ipa 3y ago
Fiddlesticks.
Redwoods are a fabulous building material. If you’re in the Bay Area, go check your houses joists. Quite a number of old houses here are made of redwood. AFAIK it makes a great wood for joists and structures because it it’s resistant to pests. My nearly 100 year old house’s joists are in fantastic condition. Big, beautiful beams, nearly completely clear and free from knots.
The reason it’s rarely used today is because we’ve cut down all the good trees and it’s wildly uneconomical to grow compared to cheaper woods.
- bink 3y agoI even lived in a house with a redwood frame in Hawaii. It was great for resisting termites.
- whoopdedo 3y ago> Fiddlesticks After some brief research, it seems that most any wood can be used, so it's possible there were redwood bows made sometime. The preferred wood is pernambuco. (From the Brazilian paubrasilia echinata tree, now an endangered species so difficult to get new sticks from.) Other popular types are snakewood, sandalwood (cheap), and brazilwood (cheaper). But lately the trend is to use carbon fiber which has become less expensive than wooden bows of the same quality.
- indoordin0saur 3y agoCoast redwoods have useful timber but Sequoias do not.
- jimnotgym 3y agoAs another poster pointed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691875 Giant Redwood is not good for construction apparently Coast Redwood on the other hand is very good. I wanted to point out to anyone interested that European Redwood is unrelated totally. It is available in building supplies as a joinery timber, but is not a kind of tree. Redwood is from pine. Whitewood (construction timber) is from spruce .