Spruce? Green or dried?

[AaronS]

Howdy everyone. What are y'all's thoughts on spruce wood in timber framing? Up here in PEI we've got mostly just red/white spruce, with some birch, aspen, and maple mixed in. Some tamarack and juniper up east. Spruce is the most available, but it seems like the poor man's white pine or douglas fir

Also, what's the general consensus on green vs. dry, especially in the context of spruce? Is it better to let the logs dry or cut them immediately? And is it good to let the timbers dry too?

[beenthere]

Cut logs green, air dry timbers on stickers, then sort out the bad actors. Maybe cut oversize and then straighten if needed on the sawmill.

Spruce wood kept dry will last, but build with strength values and structural grades for spruce in mind. It ain't white pine or Doug fir.

[barbender]

Spruce will get some nasty drying checks in it. I have an 8x8 post in our house that developed a 1" wide check. Not a big deal if you don't mind that look.

[Resonator]

I've cut a lot of spruce off my land, and as BB said you can get face checks in posts and beams. It varies in each piece how big the cracks get. You also may have to skim cut/plane the faces flat after it dries, I've used 6x6 for pole shed framing and noted this when nailing horizontal boards to them. As usual when logging the butt log and the next log up are usually best grade, the higher up the tree and more clusters of knots the weaker it gets.

[barbender]

This is the post I referenced earlier, witht the large check in the face.

[Hilltop366]

If you have the time saw over size and let dry then re-saw to final size and sort out the ones with too much twisting.

If you don't have time saw and cut joints and assemble as soon as you can, keep the sun off of them and design joints so that the ends of the beams are housed to help control twisting.

For strength spruce, pine and fir (not Douglas fir) are often grouped together, the times I have disassembled stick framing spruce is tougher than pine, knocking a stud sidewise off the nails with a maul the spruce will survive but a white pine will usually break off. Pine often behaves better with twisting than spruce. Fir trees around here (South West Nova Scotia) are sometimes rotten in the middle so often not a option.

There is a beam strength calculator in the tool box on the bottom left below the ads you can do a strength comparison of different woods to see what is what.

[Don P]

I don't think white pine is in the SPF group... hang on.. front of the Supplement.