Wane: Wednesday's Word Of The Week

You may not be able to fit a square peg in a round hole… but in the lumber industry, mills are constantly cutting rectangular lumber out of round trees. Sometimes pieces of lumber are cut from too close to the edge of the tree and the corners end up rounded off. This is referred to as Wane. Any lumber we receive with wane is sorted out during our grading process. Depending on how wide and long the areas of wane are, we might:

• Cut the board into shorter lengths to isolate the areas of wane
• Rip the board lengthwise to remove the wane and use the remaining board as a smaller size
• For very small areas of wane, the board can be used as usual. The wane will be removed during normal planing and beam sizing.

There actually is one Combination Symbol that allows material with Wane to be used: 24F-V4 SP. This would only be appropriate for Industrial Grade, because there would be unfinished voids on the beam sides. This grade also has significantly reduced allowable shear stresses because of the missing glue bond area. This is not a grade that Unalam produces.
*Wednesday's Word Of The Week is a feature on Unalam's Wood Times Blog. Each Wednesday our structural engineer, Rik Vandermeulen, will discuss a new term associated with glulam manufacturing. He will do this until we run out of words. If there is a timber or glulam term that you have heard of and want to know more about, let us know in the comments.