I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you’d think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.
I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you’d think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.
Shouldn’t the normal size be 2? Given, well, the name?
As if american measurements have ever made sense. Look up how they measure screws or wires and despair.
Or shotgun shell sizes and loads.
“It all started in 1840 when the dram was a common unit of measurement…”
And they all had onions on their belts as was the style at the time.
Five bees for a nickel.
Expect for the .410 gauge. That one is a caliber, because reasons
It’s a wonder they manage to build anything. They have pocket calculators dedicated to the building industry. It’s surreal.
Not everyone
Some people are gods when it comes to metal math
🤘🏻
every house I’ve lived in has had something fucked up in it. Even if you have one guy doing everything correct, you have 20 other contractors coming in that can’t do basic addition and subtraction, let alone fractions.
I don’t think you’re implying this is exclusively an American issue or anything but that’s just the nature of construction unless you’re paying top dollar for accuracy when it matters.
I’ve been on a hundred or more construction sites and I’d confidently wager that most houses don’t match the plans perfectly because of unforseen reasons…equipment changing due to lead times, electricians running their conduit in the wrong stud bays, etc. I’ve had to do a lot of creative problem solving and design modifications are inevitable. That’s the only thing I really miss from my old career
I’m just saying it doesn’t matter if one guy is really good because on projects that require multiple people a good team is all that matters. As far as uniqueness to the US vs everywhere, its probably worse here in the US but we have a lot of checks for extreme fuckups so we tend to just have a lot of low-mid tier fuckups. The big fuckups are when somebody lies on their expertise (like that university post tensioned beam bridge that fell in florida)
I am in chemical and material handling stuff and it’s the same. What amazes me is when the project manager can’t allow slack where slack is perfectly fine and allows slack where it isn’t.
One guy I will never forget had endless meltdowns about tiny tiny stuff in software and completely forgot that water pipes need heat tracing until the insulation was already installed. Whole project, multi tens of millions of dollars, died because of that. On the plus side before it died the password on the HMI was 8 characters long and required a number and a punctuation symbol.
Even when you are paying for accuracy… I went to a home once for someone who paid for the builders to get everything perfect; the walls were crooked and warped like every wall I’ve ever seen.
Part of that is that you need to work hard to find good people who do good work.
The other issue is that all the skilled works are either old or dead. The young guys aren’t the same type.
What I find is culture drives them out. I am pushed a lot to take away all decision making ability from the techs and electricians. This command-and-control organization system. Anyone who can change employment does and I don’t blame them.
Treat people like they are worthless and they leave. No surprises there.
My parents just had a house built last year and there is so much shit wrong. The biggest thing I found is one of the alcoves on the side of their fireplace is a full 1.5" wider in the front than the back. You don’t have to measure to see it. How the fuck the guy who did the framing, or the guy who did the drywall, or anyone else walking past that fucking thing didn’t notice I have no idea. They sold their nice old house for that pile of shit and it’s not even better even if you ignore all the problems. It pisses me off so much because I told them this was going to happen.
How do they measure despair?
The European wire gauge system makes no sense. There I said it. I don’t need to know the O.D. of the wire, I need to know the amp rating. The O.D. only becomes an issue for bending radius and there is a chart for that as well. Nothing is stopping some a**hole from making a wire almost completely out of plastic that has the O.D. of a typical 14AWG but can’t carry any serious amount of current under the European system. Under the AWG you always know what the current capacity is.
And while we are at it, you might as well standardize your wire sizes based on copper. You are never going to use anything except copper. So your units should reflect the material. I am building a chemical skid, that has nothing to do with the distance between the equator to the north pole.
Also when is the last time you were running wires that you needed a mm of precision? Meanwhile a fraction of an amp really does matter. So should not the thing that does matter be reflected in the product?
European wire gauge is not the outer diameter. It is the cross section of the conductor inside the wire in mm^2. It is the same system AWG uses (they are directly correlated) with the added benefit that the numbers make sense (10mm^2/AWG8 wire has 4x the cross section of 2.5mm^2/AWG14 wire, so a quarter of the resistance of the thicker wire and thus roughly double the current capacity).
How does 16, 14, or 12 AWG tell you anything about ampacity?
You use the chart. How does mm of a wire, including insulation, tell you ampacity? As I said it is easy to imagine a thick wire that can carry almost no current. You can’t pull that crap with AWG system. It tells you the single most important fact, how much current a wire can carry. There is no incentive for wire manufacturers to cheat the system since a thicker insulation wire just means more cost for them.
Which ties in nicely with the other charts. Tell me how much power you need a motor to deliver and what I have to deal with and I can tell you exactly what wires to use, it’s bending radius how thick it is etc. None of which I can do in the CE system.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re doing a bit or are actually serious.
Sounds like a you problem.
The convention is 2" before milling. Milling takes off 1/4"on each side, so the result is 1.5".
Is this a joke? (I know it isn’t).
Why would I want to know the dimensions of the unfinished product? I’m not a construction worker, so honestly is there any reason?
I can only think it was when the lumber mill was the dictator of terms. That’s what they put out, so that’s what it was.
Why was that ever accepted? I don’t care what size it was before milling. If I buy a 2x2 I want a 2x2.
They were when the name was made, but due to changes in the manufacturing process, they aren’t anymore. The name stuck, though.
https://www.popsci.com/two-by-four-lumber-measurements-explained/
So they can measure precisely, after all
Ans yet this piece is 1.28
1.28 is the new
21.5It’s due to the milling to square it.
You can get rough cut 2x4 or 2x2 or anything that are actually that size but by the time you trim and square it you will end up at the measurements sold in big box stores
Edit: I mean the size they used to be in store, not OPs version :(
I think this commenter is trying to say that the nominal size of a 2x2 is 2" by 2" (and it looks like they typo’d nominal to “normal”)
The actual size of a 2x2 is 1.5" by 1.5", and OP incorrectly calls these dimensions nominal
It was done for largely sensible reasons.
https://youtu.be/WaJFudED5FQ?si=7j005FmfJVr_JQL_
In short, a 2x4 was originally 2x4 inches, full stop, but it was found that this size wasn’t necessary for the strength being applied to them in construction. We were wasting lumber for no reason. They went through a few cycles of sizing down as the actual needed strength was understood better. The naming convention stuck, though.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/WaJFudED5FQ?si=7j005FmfJVr_JQL
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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No.
https://www.lowes.com/n/how-to/nominal-actual-lumber-sizes
It’s weird because it’s the size of lumber BEFORE smoothing the edges. Manufacturers take this inch a mile and the 2x4 (as well as all other dimensional lumber) has gotten smaller and smaller.
O that’s the size before planing.
Even if it was 2" from the lumber yard, it would shrink or expand quite a bit depending on the moisture content. Expecting natural products to be an exact size would be crazy, especially when talking about construction lumber.
Now this is a very extreme case, but it was probably milled to 1.5" soaking wet, and shrank a bunch after drying out on the rack. That’s also a big reason why they’re all warped.