>Technical Question:  A wood sample taken from a truss in a c1885 building
>near Las Vegas, New Mexico, was determined to be yellow pine.  I need to
>select appropriate allowable stress values from the wood code and I am not
>sure which pine to use.  Does anyone know if ponderosa pine is a yellow
>pine?  Marie.

re strength & tables :
Our Canadian Building Code has pages and pages of load tables for different
woods and grades.   It causes one to wonder a bit about all the subtle
differences described therein, so, a decade or so more ago, an engineering
professor from the University of British Columbia fitted out a trailer as a
serious mobile stress testing lab and took it on the road for a summer
project to actually test real woods in real places.   He visited logging
shows, saw mills, lumber yards and building construction sites, testing the
woods he found.   The results included many surprises, with the strongest
piece from the entire summer of testing being Western Red Cedar and the
weakest being a piece of Douglas Fir.   On a graph, the findings of all the
tests were all over the place for every type of wood.   His practical
conclusion in a report stated that we should simply have one structural use
table based on the simple mean line of results and call everyuthing by a
single grade named "Canadian Wood."  with no differentiation of species !!!

Cuyler in Kamloops
PS :    Nothing changed in the government Code book as a result of his study !

PPS :  Noting an e-list response about wood in NYC I realize this isn't so
silly.   Some years ago, I returned to visit my parents in Ithaca, NY and
drove an empty pick-up across the continent, intending to pick up some
childhood stuff from home.   Remembering that NY State had a lumber industry
when I was a child, I planned on buying lumber there and building a camper
shell on the truck to house my old treasures on the trip back to British
Columbia, hoping to save money on gas by not having an empty camper shell
pushing wind on the way East.

At the Ithaca lumber yard, the price quoted was shocking to me but I had no
choice but to buy the lumber I needed.   When I went to the yard to pick it
up, I was even more shocked to see that the name emblazoned on the deck
wrapper was the lumber mill in my neighbouring town in BC !   I could have
bought a pick-up load of that lumber in BC, carried it East and sold it in
NY and paid for my gas both ways !