[pclmulqdq]

They aren’t “knowingly selling you poor quality” as some sort of scam. They are selling you wood to the spec you asked for. If you want higher-grade wood, you either have to spend money getting lumber graded to a higher spec or spend the time going through piles of low-spec boards to find the good ones. Many engineered wood structures are designed to use “poor-quality” wood, and they prefer it because it’s cheaper than using less high-grade wood.

[vintagedave]

The thing is, other packs of the same wood to the same spec were better. We were able to sort through and get one graded/rated the same, but without problems.

I know about wood quality and I have deliberately bought higher and lower grade wood. But even so, quality varies greatly.

[pclmulqdq]

Yeah, that is correct. Sawmills often produce only one or two grades of wood and don’t do aggressive binning. That’s why the quality is so variable within the grade. There are also factors that affect the grade but don’t necessarily impact every application (eg warping and knots are sometimes ok), so the bins are coarse-grained.