38 



HARDWOOD RECORD 



dried, the flooring should be rubbed with raw linseed oil or should 

 be waxed. 



Magnesium chloride, the chief ingredient of these compositions, 

 is worth today in 50-ton lots, in casks of 880 pounds f. o. b. Ham- 

 burg, $11.50 per ton fused. If in lesser lots, say 25 tons, $12.00 

 per ton. Greek calcined and powdered magnesite, in barrels of 

 396 to 440 pounds, worth from $33.32 to $35.70 per 220 pounds 

 f . o. b. Eotterdam. Kaw magnesite, in casks, is worth $30.94 per 

 220 pounds f. 0. b. Hamburg. 



I)KAl.t;i!S IN FLOORING COMPOSITION 



rifkl & Hoppnor. HiirseiwPide No. 10, Hamburg. 

 Ai'sculap Eti'inholzwerko. Friedensallee. Altona-Ottensen. 

 Mineralit Aslii-slzfmentwerke, Hamburg. 

 Gebv. Sfhloicher, Munich. 

 K. .MuUor. LucneburK. 



.MANl-FACTURKIiS OF DYES FOR COMPOSITION FLOORINO 



Ortloff & Keilbar, Leipzig. 



Gustav Schattf & Co.. Dresden. 



Farbewerke Wunsiodel G. m. b. H., Wunsiedel Bav. 



J. G. Jabren.s & HocniR. Hamburg. 



Scbi'eyer & Klug. Langenbagen, b/Han. 



S. H. Cohn, Canner Chaussee 44, Berlin. Neukoelln. 



EXPORTER OF MAGNESIUM CHLORIDE 



Ellis Wilczynski. Bergstrasse 25, Hamburg. 



5a^:\>v>k;^itiJ^KiWit>^Wi^^tiJ^^t^iii'iij^>'^TO;A^iijiyyi.'ii;TO 



Assorting Hardwoods To Widths 



Sar '•dimension stock" to some lumbermen, and you will pel ■! 

 sensation similar to that experienced by the man who wears a 

 red flannel shirt in the vicinity of a bull of pedigree and spirit. 

 There are some wise hardwood manufacturers, who have been in 

 the business long enough to have become pretty well acquainted 

 with its peculiarities, who rise up on their hind feet and howl 

 whenever the subject is mentioned. 



"What's the use of installing resawing equipment and cutting 

 stock to dimension," the typical member of this branch of the 

 trade insists, "when the price you get out of it is no more than 

 you would realize on the material in its original form, consider- 

 ing the labor involved — when buyers are refusing to recognize 

 dimension stock as worth enough more than ordinary lumber to 

 enable you to make a profit on the operation? 



"On the other hand, users cannot or will not tell the man who 

 is resawing what dimensions they want far enough ahead to enable 

 him to work his material continuously. Thus he is never able to 

 plan ahead, but must be a special order proposition. That kind 

 of business doesn't appeal to me." 



Without discussing this angle of the business, which has already 

 been treated pretty fully in Hardwood Eecord, it may be of in- 

 terest to remark that lumbermen are gradually getting into the 

 dimension business, without going to the trouble of remanu- 

 facturing their lumber. They are doing it through the automatic 

 process of piling according to widths. 



It seems strange that this plan did not win more general 

 acceptance long ago, in view of the eilorts which have been made 

 to get more for specialties in the hardwood field, and the general 

 willingness on the part of buyers to pay more for unusual lengths — 

 and especially wide stock. It should have followed as a mat- 

 ter of course that just as the user of 14-inch boards was willing 

 to pay more for them, the man who wanted nothing except narrow 

 stock would have been glad to confine his order to them, instead 

 of buying everything the lumberman sent him, and then going to 

 the trouble of cutting them to the dimensions required. 



Nevertheless, this has not been the generally accepted view of 

 either the lumber manufacturer or the rehandler. The obvious 

 difficulty presented is that growing out of the lack of room. If the 

 wholesaler has a yard of only a few acres, and must pile his lum- 

 ber in tall stacks, close together, the opportunity for sorting it 

 according to widths is certainly not great. On the other hand, 

 the smaller mill operator doesn 't feel that it is worth his while 

 to go to the unusual labor required to pile by width, which would 

 take a multiplicity of trucks and a lot more labor, as will as 

 more time to get a carload of a given dimension. Therefore he 

 takes the easiest way out by piling, everything together and letting 

 the consumer or the wholesaler go through it for widths, if he 

 feels like it. 



Without speaking from specific information, one might safely 

 venture the opinion that many large consumers have been doing 

 this for a long time. The user of hardwoods who buys one or two 

 million feet a year, and who uses it in varying dimensions, cer- 

 tainly will not send lumber ranging in width from six to twelve inches 

 to a department where stock of only one dimension is required, 

 necessitating the use of the rip-saw, especially in view of the 



l:ict that the wider material is needed in another department. 

 The method which common sense would suggest is to give each 

 department just the widths needed, and it is therefore safe to 

 assume that it has been used by the people who have made use 

 of the lumber. 



The main reason most lumbermen have not piled by widths is 

 that they have not had definite customers for given dimensions, 

 that is to say, no one felt like going to the additional labor and 

 trouble of sorting by width without knowing whether he would 

 be. able to find a market for the various assortments. Usually, 

 therefore, the beginning of the system in individual yards was 

 developed as a matter of necessity. 



A customer ordered a special shipment of wide poplar boards, 

 let us say, and in making up the shipment the poplar stock was 

 left in a variety of widths which were not nearly so attractive, 

 and did not appear nearly so salable with the wide stock removed. 

 That put it up to the hardwood man to find a user of the stock he 

 had left. He usually succeeded in doing thus, and sold the ma- 

 terial to the people who wanted 6-inch or 8-inch or 10-inch stock, 

 as the case might be. As a rule he found that the prices he had 

 received for the special widths averaged not only enough more 

 to pay for the increased cost of handling, but made the business 

 much more attractive and profitable than if the entire poplar 

 stocks had been sold unassorted in the usual way. A lumberman 

 in one of the big central markets made the following statement in 

 favor of the plan: 



"I used to sell more plain oak than anybody else in the mar- 

 ket," he said recently. "Incidentally, I made less money on it 

 than I did on anything else. My experience in disposing of odd 

 widths of poplar after a lot of the wide stock had been sold gave 

 me a suggestion which I was not long in applying to plain oak. 

 I had every salesman in our employ give me, as nearly as he 

 could, the stock requirements of the consumers to whom they 

 sold, so that I accumulated data on the people who used various 

 widths. I went after these with an offer to furnish exactly the 

 widths they wanted, which would save handling and reduce resaw- 

 ing to a minimum. I put them up at a price which made the lum- 

 ber attractive to the user, and at the same time made the separa- 

 tion of the various widths of plain oak worth while to mc. 



"We hit a popular idea. Users found that they had been doing 

 work and producing waste for which there was no excuse, and 

 that when they ordered a carload of lumber without specifying 

 what widths they wanted, they were making certain that they 

 would have to work it to a large extent to get it the required 

 width and that they would have an appalling amount of waste. 

 Instead of simply hopiiii; that they would find a lot of boards in 

 the car that they could use without resawing, they were enabled 

 to insure getting this result by ordering on a basis of width as 

 well as length and grade. And they were more than willing to 

 pay the advanced price which I asked." 



One of the requirements for the success of a method of this 

 kind is that the lumberman handle a lot of stock. The small yard, 

 which has only a few hundred thousand feet of lumber, all told, 

 is certainly not in a position to subdivide it as well as the bigger 

 yard which carries millions of feet all the time. On the other 



