: Hi Rehd
: You are right about spalted wood being weaker and also right on the blue pine
: becoming fashionable (also called denim pine). But, at least with
: lodgepole, it is from beetle killed pine and was going for less money
: until it became a designer material because it was from salvage logging.
: If this is the beetle killed stuff, the strength should be about the same.
: I'm not 100% on this because I have not seen it in Ponderosa, just
: lodgepole. I would likely give it a try if it could be confirmed.
: take care
: don

Don

I helped clear about 1,200 acres of pime a few years ago as those bettles were getting into them. They were dying and the needles were all falling and ruining some good grazing areas. This guys cattle wouldn't eat the grass with the pine needles in it. So, he dozed them over and we cut them up. This left nothing but Oak, scrub oak and manzeneda(?). But, I digress.....

The majority of the trees we took out had the spalting in them but we didn't really look into them all. Just cut them onto rounds. I never did make the connection between the two.. What I was told at that time was the trees were diseased and that allowed the beetles to invade them and.... ??

Too bad we weren't in any position to harvest that stuff... and mill it...
The land owner wanted it cut up for firewood and was selling it about as fast as we could cut it each season.

I think that random steaking would make for a very interesting deck design but would take some good matching skills to get it all in order.

At the time I had no clue what kind of pine we were cutting, but the pine we get around here ( suppliers ) is Ponderosa and I've seen spalting in some of it. Although they haven't gotten to the point where they pull it out and seperate it with a different price.. ??

One thing I've noticed is that stains really soak into those areas so care has to be taken to eliminate dark splotches.

O.K., now I'm curious.. Time to go scouting the wood piles again....

Rehd