The Fascinating World of Engineered Lumber!

Look, if I have to sit through it, you have to, too!

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to attend a seminar about laminated lumber to help fulfill my architectural licensing requirements. Here in Alabama, we have to do twelve hours annually of such stuff, and this class knocked out two hours of that. It also provided much content for my inner curmudgeon to rant and rave about.

First, the product itself is best described by their website, which is here. Basically, engineered lumber is made from bits and pieces of trees pressed together with adhesive. Doesn't sound particularly interesting, but actually the stuff is pretty amazing, and allows a much greater utilization of a tree which might normally get thrown away as waste material. It also allows the use of younger, faster growing farmed trees instead of old growth timber, and the controlled method of manufacture helps to negate the effects of soft wood, knots, and other defects, and means that less desireable species of wood can be used without a loss of strength. It gives a product that is straighter, truer, and less prone to warpage and cupping than sawn lumber. In general, pretty neat material. Although sorta expensive.

Now then, having dispensed with that, the seminar itself was certainly an...experience.

I skipped lunch so I could go to the bank and not have to ask for too much time off, so when I got to the lovely Mountain Brook Inn, I decided to head for their restaurant. The waitress gave me a takeout box and I proceeded to fill it with some really disappointing and mundane food from the buffet. I really was expecting...I don't know, something more in keeping with the high class reputation of the place, but it was just lukewarm junk that would get thrown out of a chain like Piccadilly's or Golden Corral. Good to see that the quality didn't prevent them from pretending it was good--the mess set me back ten bucks! But, it was lunch, and I was hungry.

I took it back to the seminar room and figured I would get in the very far back by the wall so I wouldn't distract people and spread out a bit so no one would sit by me. There was a whole room full of tables in front of me, and lots of open chairs, which meant that the two old codgers who came in a few minutes later really had to think hard to be able to decide to come and sit down right by me. ::sigh::

I moved my free product information binder and my free doodle pad and my free coffee mug with the handle in the shape of an elephant's head (part of their old ad campaign that shows an elephant standing on a floor made from their products), and my food over so they could grab a couple of chairs. Gosh, first bad food, and now the bracing aromas of Old Spice and Camel Unfiltereds. They were definitely Old School guys and rambled on like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppets. Except not funny. They got to talking about pens, because one of the giveaways was a wood-barreled ballpoint, and were going on about those Mount Blank ballpoint pens [sic--I know it's Mont Blanc, pronounced in a suitably Frogophilic fashion, but to these fellows it was Mount Blank] that are the best in the world, and then they got on a tear about those Rolex watches that are the best in the world, and how to tell a fake Rolex from a real one (which is really an outdated bit of lore, as there are now Swiss makers knocking off Rolexes using a sweep-second ETA 2824-2 Automatic movement, which is similar to the ones used in the Tudor line until pretty recently, and they are actually pretty nice looking watches--I resisted the urge to hold forth on this, however--no one likes a smarty pants.) They managed to keep up a low raspy chatter the entire class, about not much in particular. It was pretty funny when they picked up part of the sales-guy/presenter's patter about "what we do is take the tree apart and put it back together," which got repeated about a thousand times. They managed to grab one of the samples making its way around the room, and one said with great authority, "You know, what they've done here really is just take the tree apart and put it back together." Yes. Very true, indeed.

Of course, my own old-fartitude showed through near the start of class when the sales guy was passing out his schwag. One of the items was an 18 inch long scale, and one of the young computer savvy duuuuudes down at the other end of the table said something about really wanting one of those "rulers." AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! Scale, SCALE, SCALE! It's a stinkin' SCALE! To the general public, a long plastic and wood stick thing with equally spaced numbers on it looks like a ruler, but for those who went to architecture school, a scale is a measuring device used for making scale drawings, NOT for measuring the curtains or drawing lines in your Power Puff Girls notebook. And definitely not for cutting! This used to be the first thing they taught you in school, and those who insisted on calling it a "ruler" where publicly humiliated and forced to endure horrible punishments. Hmmph! Not anymore, I see! "Ruler!" Sheesh! Kids today. (Then again, he might have gotten out of architectural school without ever having picked up a lead holder--I hear tell they use them there "computers" to draw with.)

Anyway, the class itself was a marvel of confusion. The guy teaching the class was not an engineer, but a salesman. So he spent most of the time making lame jokes and trying to act like he was an engineer. In general, sizing structural members is relatively straightforward, and he gave us a huge stack of product binders and load tables which tell you everything. This didn't stop him from insisting on acting like he was teaching us how to properly size stuff, in a peculiar, rapid-fire chatter that made me forget everything I knew. He also was apparently enamored of Socrates, and used a variation on his pedagogical method. I say variation, because although he tried to lead the discussion by asking questions, the questions themselves had absolutely no relation to the subject at hand, and it was impossible to tell what point he was trying to make--

"Okay, let's say that you've got a building, and it's Tuesday. What are you thinking?" Huh?

"Okay, so you've got a snow load, and you're in Madison, Wisconsin, and the load chart tells you that there are fifteen different sizes that could be used. What is the contractor's shoe size?" WTF?

"Okay, is is hot in here? If I dim the lights, will y'all go to sleep? Okay, these joists come from our factory a little ways north of here in Canada...That's really not a short way away, is it? NO, it's a long way! Almost 600 miles north of Detroit!" Wha?

"Okay, you've got your L/360, and L equals what? Length, right, so then where should you stand?" Please, stop, mister. Chatterchatterchatter. It became painfully obvious that his technical knowledge was limited to repeating various jargon, so the whole thing was an exercise in not being rude and shouting at him, at least for me.

He also had an interesting way of abusing the English language. Now I realize I do a lot of that in this blog, but it is usually done knowingly to pump up the silliness factor. However, when I am out having to do my actual job, proper usage and grammar are very important--something misstated or unclear can have some pretty dire consequences. When I'm around people in the trade, I make a point of using the proper terms properly. In a seminar like this, I sorta expect a similar courtesy from the presenters. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the past tense of "span" is not "spanned," but "spun"! As in, "Okay, we had a project and we had a 40 foot long joist that spun over two walls." I couldn't figure out WHAT he was talking about until it finally occurred to me that he was just a silly putz. Then there was a question from the audience about how much bearing area did the end of a particular truss need. (The bearing area is where a beam or joist sits on top of a wall or other member--in general, heavier loads require a larger area to properly transfer the load down) He expressed this area as a "circumference." "Okay, you've got a lot of material on both sides and that makes that load circumference better." Then there was his use of the word "masonary." "Masonary" does not exist. There is such a thing as masonry, however, and people who do what this fellow does for a living ought to know that. Then again, most everyone should know that if you want someone to contact you "via e-mail," that you do not say, "Okay, you can contact me V-I-A e-mail." What did he think VIA stood for? Probably something French, like RSVP. Or C.O.D. And did I mention that he started every sentence with "okay?"

What makes it worse is that he got his business degree the same place I got my architecture degree. ::sigh:: At least when I went there, they made a point of telling us if we screwed something up to say we graduated from Georgia Tech.
posted by Terry at 10:33:00 AM