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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

The wood is somewhat brittle. When they felled lots of them in the US 100 years ago, the loggers found to their great disappointment little use for the resulting wood, and turned most of the giant trees into... matchsticks, and that sort of scrap thing.

Possibly the trees can be harvested more delicately today, though.

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They cut down trees that were 10+ feet wide to make matchsticks? That makes the whole affair even more disappointing.

no, mostly shingles. still sad but not matchsticks, they cut 24-18 foot sections of these 10-30 foot diameter trees that almost all fell fully intact and hauled them to nearby mills that cut them down to boards and posts and shingles and built Pacific coast cities with them.

Not matchsticks, shingles and most didn't shatter, only some. they cut them into 24 foot sections and used oxen and horses/mules plus steamdogs to move them to nearby mills that cut them down to shingles and they were shipped over the mountains to towns and larger waterways where they became things like the city of San Francisco.

Please do not spread the matchsticks myth. It's insulting the trees and to to San Francisco and other impressive mausoleums of these once noble organisms.

Fiddlesticks.

Redwoods are a fabulous building material. If you’re in the Bay Area, go check your houses joists. Quite a number of old houses here are made of redwood. AFAIK it makes a great wood for joists and structures because it it’s resistant to pests. My nearly 100 year old house’s joists are in fantastic condition. Big, beautiful beams, nearly completely clear and free from knots.

The reason it’s rarely used today is because we’ve cut down all the good trees and it’s wildly uneconomical to grow compared to cheaper woods.

I even lived in a house with a redwood frame in Hawaii. It was great for resisting termites.

> Fiddlesticks

After some brief research, it seems that most any wood can be used, so it's possible there were redwood bows made sometime. The preferred wood is pernambuco. (From the Brazilian paubrasilia echinata tree, now an endangered species so difficult to get new sticks from.) Other popular types are snakewood, sandalwood (cheap), and brazilwood (cheaper). But lately the trend is to use carbon fiber which has become less expensive than wooden bows of the same quality.

Coast redwoods have useful timber but Sequoias do not.

As another poster pointed out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691875

Giant Redwood is not good for construction apparently

Coast Redwood on the other hand is very good.

I wanted to point out to anyone interested that European Redwood is unrelated totally. It is available in building supplies as a joinery timber, but is not a kind of tree. Redwood is from pine. Whitewood (construction timber) is from spruce .

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