Wane for Woodworking Dummies

wane in lumber

Our staffers often find amusing connections among the many contributors to the former eHow.com. Think about it: you can ask almost exactly the same question different ways, but whatever algorithm Demand Media (DMS)¹ used to capture those search queries wasn't smart enough to recognize two essentially identical questions. The "contributors," on the other hand? Some were pretty sly... included among those might be Kate Bruscke, who leveraged her design MFA to address the question, "What Is Wane in Wood?" for HomeSteady.com.

DMS did not allow its freelancers to cite content from its own library as a source (apparently, they realized how stupid some of it was), so Bruscke couldn't cite the nearly identical eHow post "What Is Wane in Lumber" that was written by J-school grad Amy Armstrong, a post since rewritten by the professional carpenter Wade Shaddy. Bruscke did little more than copy-reword-paste Armstrong's version, including its errors and even one of its non-existent references. Here are some of the places the two went wonky:

• "Wane is found on the edges of cut lumber or on veneer plywood." – The term "wane" is rarely used in plywood, and where it is it doesn't apply to the "edges": it refers to an uncorrected thin in one of the plies.
• "Wood is graded, depending on its strength and appearance." – We put that up mostly to make fun of the superfluous comma.
• "Wood with wane is suitable for a wide number of projects, including the building of furnishings, fixtures and interior structures. The only use for which it is inappropriate is as framing lumber in house construction." – Wait: doesn't "framing lumber in house construction" include "interior structures"? This was Bruscke's reword of Armstrong's claim that, "Wood with wane is not approved for use in home construction, particularly in the production of trusses." In reality, building code allows limited wane in studs, though not in rafters or joists.

More on that last comment, however: wood with wane is not suitable for building furnishings except for the frame of certain upholstered pieces or furniture intended to look "rustic." What neither Armstrong nor Bruscke seemed to realize, however, is that cutting off the portion of the board with wane improves both its strength and its appearance, meaning that carpenters and woodworkers with experience (like, perhaps, Shaddy) have no problems with a little bark left on the raw lumber. Bruscke didn't seem to know that, however, which meant that she was pretending to have knowledge she merely harvested from another freelancer. That's what earns her the Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ DMS, or Demand Media Studios, was the parent company of eHow. It's since changed its name to Leaf Group, which bugs our staffers who always like to say, "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS'!"

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