We Know a Lot About Wood, but Not Everything

For as long as I can remember, wood has been a part of my life: cutting trees, building cabins, barns, bridges, docks, and other structures. I still have a “loony bin” (piggy bank) I made in high school wood shop, along with a wood bowl I turned. Wood is part of all our lives, but sometimes we need to recognize that we don’t know everything.

One of my earliest memories of working with my dad was helping him take a door off its hinges and plane it down so that it wouldn’t stick. He then told me to sand down the front of the door and paint it, and he left to do something else, entrusting the tasks completely to me. As with most projects your dad asks you to do, it took longer than anticipated, and I got several instructions wrong. With the door on the sawhorses, I went into the woodshop to get the electric sander, but couldn’t find it, so I decided to use the electric planer instead.

I went to work running the planer down the face of the door. The brown paint disappeared, and a fresh wood surface showed up. Everything was going fine until I got to the edge and ran into some nails. Not realizing they would chip the planer blades, I just kept going. Soon, a trail of ridges was following behind me. In my young brain, the logical way to get rid of the ridges was to go over them again. More wood off, more ridges in different spots. Deeper I went again, this time trying to hover over the wood to take off only the ridges. But, of course, once the planer hit the wood, it dug in and bogged down in the door, leaving a huge gash.

Now, in the history of the world, there has never been a young son who completely met his dad’s expectations when given a task. This was no different. There I was, with less than half the project done, a huge gash in the door, and no idea how to fix it. I could try to fix it again, but doing so would probably make it worse. Better to find my dad, and that is what I did. After a lecture about sanders vs. planers and the task of sanding out the ridges and the rest of the door, the project was finished.

NHLA has made mistakes in the past—things like taking structural grades out of the Rules Book, capping member dues at $50 million in hardwood revenue, delegating promotion and advocacy to others, selling off services, and focusing on the old rules while the industry changed, to name a few. We tried to fix some of those problems by digging deeper, but that only made things worse. The real solution was to change strategies, get the right tools, and get the right advice.

The NHLA Board changed its strategy with the 2023 strategic plan, expanding the focus from maintaining rules and lumber grading to also growing and stabilizing the entire hardwood industry. NHLA was just awarded another $1 million Wood Innovation Grant from the USFS, to go with the $1.58 million we received over the last three years. These grants have become an important tool as we focus on promoting Real American Hardwood® and improving production at hardwood mills and yards.

NHLA inspectors have been saving members money by performing yield analyses; we are helping members look at their costs through the benchmarking study; and we are opening up markets with the LCA study.

My advice right now, during these hard economic times, is to ask us to look at your operations and see if we can help you save money. Not because you don’t know what you’re doing, but because we can offer strategies, tools, and advice that might help.

After all, we may know a lot about wood, but none of us knows everything. That is common ground we can all work from.

By Dallin Brooks, NHLA Executive Director