LR2 Blogs

Forest Products Laboratory — Forest Service — USDA

Wood Handbook
Wood as an engineering material. General Technical Report 113.
Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory. 463 p.

I just ran across this book in PDF form from the Forest Service. I used some of the data in here when we built a timber-frame house. The properties of the wood and a few general engineering equations are about all you need to determine the safe load of wooden beams and posts.

In case you you would rather have a dead tree version, here’s the Wood Handbook on Amazon.