I was thinking the same thing....”tubuhfor” has always been that size, right?
Yep. The plaintiffs need to be horsewhipped. So should the judge. Then the plaintiffs should to be horsewhipped again.
Nope. They used to average 2 real inches by 4 real inches. The studs in the 100 year old section of my house are that dimension. 1.5” x 3.5” was the lower end of the tolerance level for old sawmill technology. They couldn’t cut as accurately as we can now, so anything between that lower limit and 2.5”x4.5” could be called and understood within the trade to be a 2x4.
As sawmill technology improved, they took the industry standard — a 2x4 is anything between 1.5” and 2.5” thick + 3.5” and 4.5” wide — and set all the tolerances at the extreme low end. This results in us getting perfectly uniform boards so the architects know exactly what they will do, and the sawmills get more useful boards out of the same tree.
The 2” was 1-5/8” from the 1920s, down to 1-1/2 in the 1960s.
Per the American Lumber Standards Committee and approved by Department of Commerce.
History of Yard Lumber Size Standards
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/misc/miscpub_6409.pdf
What’s a tubuhfor?
For playing “oom pah” music, dummy!