Actually a lot of U.S. wood is, or at least was, sold to the Japanese as logs, which they loaded on ships and milled to size on the voyage over to Japan from our west coast. Japanese efficiency. This of course took away a lot of U.S. jobs and there were bills in Congress to prohibit selling "raw" logs. Don't know what actually became of that. Since so much of milling operations are computerized these days, you only have to activate a program to change the dimensions of the output lumber. But a mill would probably only do metric sizes on order, so they could ship it out immediately and not have to store different sizes. Basically no different than plywood or drywall. Paul -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Greg in USMA 8782 asked: >I know that Canada exports quite a bit of dimensional lumber to Japan. >Does anyone know if they use the same 2x4 as we do in North America? Traditional Japanese building methods are quite different from North American methods and require different lumber. I read of a British Columbia lumber mill that specialized in supplying Japan with lumber cut to traditional Japanese sizes and quality. I have been unable to lay my hands on the reference.
