HARDWOOD RECORD 



29 



"We shall have to admit," summarized a quartered oak man, 

 "that we have lost ground of late. The fight which the National 

 Lumber Manufacturers' Association, as well as the lumber trade 

 papers, is making against the use of all-steel ears may help the 

 lumber trade in that direction, but we cannot expect that organi- 

 zation to battle for quartered oak against mahogany or any other 

 wood. The same thing is true of the interior finish trade. The 

 'fireproof fanatics may be beaten in their efforts to rule wood 

 out of building construction, but this effort will not necessarily 

 net us anything unless we have created favor for quartered oak 

 in the meantime. Manufacturers of business equipment who 

 have gone into the steel goods trade — most of them because thev 

 fancied they saw a public demand for that class of furniture — 

 may find that they were wrong, and that the wooden commodity 

 is the main thing after all; but if they turn away from metal 

 construction, will quartered oak necessarily reap a benefit? 



''We must hand it to the mahogany people, who have been 

 quietly and efficiently plugging away, and who have been win- 

 ning a place for their goods in every possible line. Wherever fine 

 finish is desired, there you will find a mahogany man, talking not 

 the low price of his commodity, but the excellence of mahogany 

 for that purpose. He is talking it to the architect for the most 

 part, to the interior finish manufacturer some, and to the con- 

 sumer only a little. He knows that the public will use whatever 

 it thinks is proper, and that the architects who specify mahogany 

 are responsible for the place it has taken in the building trades. 

 ' ' Quartered oak men have been taking whatever has been 

 offered, without stopping to analyze the situation nor to deter- 

 mine why more business from that source is being offered. Today, 

 with building construction in many parts of the country at a 

 boom stage, and with the mahogany mills running night and day 

 in order to supply the demand for material for interior finish 

 purposes, we quartered oak men are offering our stocks at low 

 prices and are not moving enough to reduce the quantities we 

 have in our yards to the normal proportions. 



"We have reached the point now where we are only hoping 

 that the price of mahogany will rise to such a point, following 

 the present heavy demand, that consumers, for the sake of 

 economy, will use quartered oak instead. 



"Quartered oak producers, without apology to the mahogany 

 manufacturers who have built up a splendid trade by using good 

 sense and judgment in cultivating users, should go into tho 

 market offering their goods not as second best, but as first class, 

 admitting no superior. They should compete for business not 

 when mahogany is too high-priced for the job, but whether ma- 

 hogany can be used or not. Quartered oak should be put forward 

 not as a cheaper material than mahogany, but as a distinctive 

 finish which has dignity, durability, beauty of figure and finish 

 and historic associations to commend it, and which has been found 

 good enough to furnish the palaces of kings since royalty wa=> 

 established. 



"There is no reason waiting for the crumbs of business which 

 fall from the table of the mahogany kings, though that is what 

 some of the quartered oak contingent are doing; but what we 

 should do is to gird up our loins, jump into the arena and make 

 a hard and honest fight for a just share of the interior finish busi- 

 ness of the country. Then we won 't be as dependent on one 

 class of business as we are now, with quartered oak business 

 dull simply because the furniture trade is dull. Like the ma- 

 hogany manufacturers, we would be able to keep busy on the 

 building trades' demand, and be able to maintain our prices to 

 factory consumers no matter whether their demand was up to par 

 or not." 



A consideration which has been suggested, too, is that it is 

 practically impossible, in some parts of the country, to manufacture 

 plain oak at a profit. Quartered oak must be made in order to 

 enable the mill to be run at a profit. In sections where timber 

 has been purchased at a satisfactory figure, and where manufac- 

 turing conditions are favorable, plain oak, for which there is at 

 present a better demand, relatively, than quartered oak, is 



manufactured almost exclusively. Those who are able to produce 

 plain oak at a sufficiently low price to have a fair margin are 

 thus practically abandoning the quartered oak field, while the 

 producers of the latter material are finding the demand restricted 

 and the output too great because of the encroachments on the 

 one hand of mahogany and on the other of steel. 



Mahogany manufacturers are given credit for being rather 

 shrewd in not opposing, if not actually encouraging, the use of 

 substitutes for their wood. That is to say, where a cheaper ma- 

 terial than mahogany is wanted, they have suggested the use of 

 stained birch, gum, or some other wood adapted for the purpose 

 of creating a mahogany effect. The mahogany manufacturers have 

 not stood in the way of the development of this trade, but have 

 been rather glad that it has been taken care of, since it carries 

 forward the mahogany vogue and helps to strengthen the standing 

 of the wood. Besides, they have had enough business not to be 

 worried because of the use of substitutes, particularly as the 

 latter only served to call attention to the growing demand for 

 mahoganized effects, if not mahogany itself. 



The quartered oak people may not be in position to advertise. 

 They may decide, if the matter is ever gotten into formal shape, 

 that it would not pay them to attempt to use publicity as a 

 means of preventing the loss of additional business or regaining 

 any of the ground that seems to have been taken over by other 

 interests. At all events, however, the suggestion is an interesting 

 one. and it will be worth while to note whether anything comes 

 of it. 



Birch for Wood Strains 



Wood strains are used for insulators in overhead electric line 

 construction. They consist of pieces of wood ranging from eigtt 

 inches to several feet in length and from one inch to four or 

 five inches in diameter at their smallest point. Malleable iron 

 lugs are wedged onto the ends of these sticks so that the wood is 

 subjected to an endwise pull. The wood commonly used is hard ot 

 sugar maple which is first impregnated with paraffine and then 

 coated with a heavy oil paint. 



Sometimes it is not easy to get the right quality of sugar 

 maple at a reasonable price and therefore some of the eastern 

 electrical companies are beginning to use black and yellow birch 

 for this purpose. While black (or cherry) birch is superior to 

 yellow birch, yet both will make good wood-strain material. 

 There is almost no danger of any wood being pulled in two length- 

 wise when made up as wood strains are. The whole question is 

 concerned with the attachment of the lugs to prevent them slip- 

 ping off the ends. When this happens the failure is due partly 

 to compression but more particularly to longitudinal shear. By 

 compression is meant that the wood tends to squeeze down so as 

 to slip through; by longitudinal shear, that an outer ring of wood 

 would be pulled off. In reality both occur but the latter is the 

 only one of importance to be considered when woods like maple 

 or birch are used. 



The ability of any wood to resist pulling in two in direction of 

 its fibers is many times greater than its resistance to shear. A 

 wood strain of black birch one inch in diameter at its smallest 

 portion would require a load of over 20,000 pounds to cause it to 

 pull in two. As strains of this size are required to stand a com- 

 mercial test of 3,500 pounds, it is evident that birch is strong 

 enough to resist any tensile stress to which in practice it will ever 

 be subjected. The important point in using a wood softer than 

 maple is to increase the efficiency of the attachments. This can be 

 done by increasing the length of the part inclosed by the lugs. 



After wood strains have been in use for some time, the paints 

 wears off leaving the wood protected only by the paraffine. The 

 question then of the durability of the wood under these condi- 

 tions is to be considered, but there is no reason to believe that 

 birch is not the equal of maple in this respect. Moreover, dif- 

 ficulty of this kind could be overcome by impregnating the wood 

 with some antiseptic oil instead of parafSne, 



