COLIN LAMB wrote:
The Pacific Northwest used to have large stands of Sitka Spruce
trees.
Alas, they were mostly cut down for airplanes - World War I airplanes
to be
exact.

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I guess they missed a few trees here & there. According to an FPL
report from the 1930's there was about 45 BILLION board feet of
havestable Sitka spruce in American forests and about three times that
amount in Canada.

But not in large stands. You'll occasionally see a pocket of nothing
but Sitka spruce but it normally grows in mixed stands, usually with
Western Hemlock. That's because of a little bug called the Spruce
Weevil. In the wild, growing in mixed stands, the spruce weevil isn't
much of a problem but it's deadly to single-specie stands of Sitka
spruce, as people have discovered from single-specie 're-forestation'
projects. Major thigh-slapper to foresters. Millions of dollars
wasted to produce square miles of Spruce Weevil fodder. [The weevil
attacks the new growth; you end up with a stunted, ground-hugging shrub
-- a 'forest' less than chest high.) USDA still has a lot to learn
from Mother Nature :-) (Today, the largest stands of Sitka spruce are
probably in Europe.)

The reality of Sitka spruce is that only 6% to 8% of an A-class log is
liable to meet aircraft-quality specs. Even then, the stick has to be
quarter-sawn before it can be accurately graded which means the sawyer
is liable to lose money on the deal unless he knows he's got a market
for it.

Fortunately, that reality works both ways. Since the major expense is
in the wastage and labor of resawing, if you can find a nice balk of
Sitka spruce and do the cutting, curing and grading yourself, you can
save over 90% compared to store-bought 'certified' spruce. (During the
height of the Depression, in order to save on freight and reduce
wasteage, Bill Piper Sr. drove to Oregon and hauled hand-selected loads
of spar-stock back to Pennsylvania on a rented trailer.)

Some lumber companies here in California still run their own barges
down from the PNW (Dixieline is one) and are willing to throw a log or
two on the load and even mill it to your spec. Assuming your pockets
are deep enough :-)

On the other hand, Western Hemlock is an acceptable substitute for
Sitka spruce and is about 8x more plentiful, plus the yield of
'aircraft-quality' timber is 10% to 12% for the same size log.

-R.S.Hoover