Fir

Also called: douglas fir, silver fir, scotch fir, abies

"Fir" is a name used loosely, Jones (1920) warned, "both in commerce and in botany," and it covers several distinct softwoods rather than one. Two groups matter most here: Douglas-fir, and the group of western firs sold together in the trade as white fir.

Douglas-fir

Douglas-fir wood varies widely in both weight and strength, and it usually shows tight, uniform grain. Its sapwood runs whitish through pale yellow to a reddish-white tone, and its thickness varies from tree to tree. It is a resinous softwood with a strong contrast between springwood, the paler, less dense wood laid down early in the growing season, and summerwood, the darker band laid down later, and this contrast gives the timber a pronounced figure, especially when it is rotary-cut into veneer by peeling a log against a blade as the log turns. In the trade it is also named by the region it grew in, sold as Colorado, Oregon or Rocky Mountain fir. Alongside birch, it is one of the two plywood types most commonly used in general construction, and as formwork, the mould into which wet concrete is cast, Douglas-fir plywood prints its own grain pattern into the concrete, a look sometimes used deliberately as a decorative finish.

Western true firs

The western true firs are cut chiefly in sawmills in Idaho, Montana, California, Oregon and Washington, then sold nationally under the single trade name white fir. They are light in weight, and with the exception of subalpine fir, they run somewhat stronger than balsam fir.

Old-world and other named firs

Riga fir, shipped from the Russian port of that name north of Memel, was ranked by Hasluck (1907) as weaker than the best Dantzic and Memel fir, shipped from those two Baltic ports, and its logs ran smaller on average. Hasluck also recorded that a cheaper Baltic fir saw much wider use in England than a costlier comparison timber, though which timber that was is not clear from the surviving passage: "it is more expensive than Baltic fir, consequently is not so largely used in England." American Red Pine, called yellow pine in the United States, he judged to closely resemble Scotch fir, though falling short of it in strength and durability, and not growing as large as the best Dantzic and Memel timber. Tredgold (1871) compared silver fir against pinaster pine: "the wood of the pinaster is more durable in water than in air, is of a finer grain than either the pine or silver fir, and contains less resin than either," which makes silver fir the coarser-grained and more resinous of the two. In China, Jones (1920) rated Abies veitchii the finest fir found there, used for matches, telegraph poles, and pulp for papermaking.