New Equation Could Turn Crooked, Forked Logs Into Building Columns

New Equation Could Turn Crooked, Forked Logs Into Building Columns

At a Finnish sawmill, a felled tree gets sorted in seconds. The straight, fat trunk becomes saw logs, the good stuff, the boards and beams that hold up our buildings. Everything else, the bent tops, the forked bits, the awkward curves, gets shunted toward a different fate: pulped into paper, or burned for energy. Centuries of timber practice have run on this one quiet assumption, that the best wood is the wood that looks like a plank waiting to …