Tag Archives: lumber

A woooden board has to lie? I ain’t lettin’ this one by.

Post #142 from Dr. Crankenfuss, The World’s Awesomest Raving and Rapping blogger –

When is a board not a board? I’m serious. This isn’t a little kids’ joke that can be answered with, “When it’s floating in the water next to the boat.” No, I mean a real board, like a 2×4 that is used in most any kind of house there is.

See, I have a friend who’s taking Shop—the kind where you go build stuff, not the one that teaches you how to behave at the mall—and he told me that a 2×4 is really only one and a half inches by three and a half inches. Huh? That’s a pretty big difference. Say you’re trying to fill a box with a bunch of boards—Don’t bother to ask why. Just go with me on this, okay?—and the box is a foot high, foot wide, and two feet from end to end. Like the box just below, okay.

wooden_gray_box1Nice looking box, eh? Anyway you get some two foot long 2×4’s. You’re good in math so you figure it will take three boards to go across the bottom (which would be a foot total since you multiply 3 X 4) and six boards from the bottom to the top (since 6 X 2 = 12). So that’s 18 boards in all, right?

WRONG! You would still have all this empty space left in the box. I don’t see how builders can work this way. Why isn’t a 2×4 a 2×4? It’s like they round up. Way up. Saying one and half inches is two inches is like adding 33% to it. It’s like those ice cream cartons that everyone calls half a gallon, but they’re way smaller than that. (So the companies can get more of your money without you thinking about it, see? Ooh, they ARE sneaky, aren’t they?)

Hey, if I use this strategy, it could really help me. Say I’m five feet tall. (I’m really taller, but I want the math to be easy.) I can just say, “Yo, dudes, I’m a massive six foot eight inches tall.” (33% extra). Wow, looks like I’m going out for basketball after all.

And if I go to a movie, I can just give the guy in the window $6 and tell him, “Hey, guy in the window, this may look like $6, but it’s really $8. So let me in, all right?”

Just trying to help out, ya’ know. That’s what I do, remember? Point out stuff that needs fixing. Which will make life better for all of us.

Talk to you soon, I hope.

Your Dude with the ‘Tude,
Dr. Crankenfuss