Newbie intro and plans

[zanelee]

Yes, Glenn. Very thankful that Ernest is here. 
It's quite nice to get to talk to someone who's actually done it...

Don_P-splash zones...hadn't thought about that before. Need to walk around our plans and see about that one. Thank you for bringing that up.

Ernest...don't know much about aspen. Is it a softwood? Our local pines are a softwood. (kind of keeping my fingers crossed here) Hope you don't mind all my questions... But even the locals say your the cordwood guru. LOL!

[Ernest T. Bass]

If the shoe fits, it just might be your shoe 

Around here the old log houses were clapboarded for the same reason. I've been under the siding on a few where they were covering rot, usually started in a splash zone. It has become fashionable to remove the siding and show off the logs... which a couple of generations ago folks were eager to cover up and hide their humble abode.

Same thing around here.. A lot of times there are some pretty cool dovetailed cabins with ancient newspapers stuffed between the chinking buried under that awful sawdust fiber board siding stuff..

As far as the technicalities behind Aspen, I'm sure Don knows a lot more about it.. Some people have told me that it is actually a hardwood, being a deciduous tree, but its characteristically more like pine, with fewer knots , more brittle and somewhat more rot-prone. I guess it's a cottonwood?

[MountainDon]

Technically aspen is a hardwood. There is a great variation in actual hardness of woods in both the softwood and hardwood groups. Balsa is a hardwood. It's actually very strong on a weight for weight basis. 

[zanelee]

Hmm...never would have thought balsa was a hardwood. Interesting.
Anyone have any thoughts on building with softwoods vs. hardwoods?

[MountainDon]

If you are going to be purchasing your lumber from lumber dealers or big box stores you will find a variety of softwoods being sold as construction lumber. Smaller mills in the eastern part of the country may have some hardwoods, but as far as I know softwoods are king for framing. All the tables in the IRC are based on softwoods. I'm not sure I'd want to be hand nailing much dried hardwood.

EDIT: Ooops I lost track of the cordwood idea.

[Ernest T. Bass]

You don't really want to cordwood with hardwood unless you live in a very dry climate and put a wrap-around covered porch on your house. The wood expands so powerfully when it takes on moisture that it has been known to bust mortar and lift walls several inches..

[Don_P]

Some dry stuff,
A couple of old adages come to mind;
Not all hardwoods are hard, not all softwoods are soft
If you know nothing else about a piece of wood specific gravity tells you more than anything about strength and shrinkage.

The second one is loaded. Amongst thousands of species and billions of individuals, just like people there is a whole lot of variability. So these are generalities.
A denser stick is stronger than a light piece (Hey, there's more wood there!). Typically the denser the wood the more it will move with moisture change, an oak floor will move more than a pine floor (There's more cellulose there!). Now you see the quandry, often the question is where is the best balance of strength and dimensional stability. Being natural, exceptions abound. Some woods with high extractives content have high specific gravity yet low shrinkage, the non wood "stuff" keeps the cells from being able to shrink as much...black locust, mahogany and teak are dense yet do not shrink nearly as much as that density number would lead one to think. Honduran mahogany and sweetgum have similar specific gravity yet mahogany has shrinkage numbers of 3% radial/4.1% tangential and sweetgum is 5.3% and 10.2% respectively...extractives vs the relative lack of. A lifetime of study is woefully insufficient and yet we seem to make do  .

I'd be looking for a wood with low shrinkage numbers so the mortar to wood joint is not gapping or crushing. This is a good place to spend a little time; http://www.woodbin.com/calcs/shrinkulator.htm
Don't underestimate the power of swelling wood, the ancients quarried stone by drilling holes, pounding in wood and wetting it. I've seen swelling wood move walls inches, or in a log wall built with green wood that dries and shrinks the wall can drop inches.

Cedar is neat, naturally pretty dry, durable, stable. Do think about the nature of the extractives in durable woods, they are natural but are not neccessarily good for you. We smell a pleasant aroma in cedar, an insect smells poison. Mr Phyfe and Chippendale were more than happy to use mahogany when they got their hands on it, big beautiful and stable. A number of woodworkers of the day also got what they thought was pneumonia... it was the dust. Locust sends lots of folks into a tailspin, I am sensitized to western cedar.

The right hand sidebar on this page has wood techsheets from the forest products labs;
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/research/centers/woodanatomy/index.php

Aspen is a populus as is cottonwood 

Am I remembering that Rob Roy has used black locust?