Chuck Norton said:

> I do not purchase budget woodenware because these
> truly are rejects and the quality is truly missing.

Perhaps things have changed in 20 years, but I know the majority of
bee supply dealers out there, as most all of them sell Bee-Quick.

EACH and EVERY one of them have significant integrity, and all
are smart enough to know that a super that is "sloppy enough"
to violate bee space has no possible use except as "board stock"
to be ripped into wooden entrance reducers.

Before we started churning out our own boxes (in the 1980s),
we spoke with a number of the well-known names in bee supplies,
and each and every one assured us that even their "Budget"
woodenware would be within reasonable dimensional tolerances,
and thus not violate bee space.

We ordered a bunch, spot-checked a statistically significant
random sample before assembling with the intention of rejecting
the lot if a large number of the components were found to be lacking.
What we found was that there were few VERTICAL tolerance problems
that would impact bee space.

The most common problem was poor fit on the finger joints, clearly
the result of blades getting dull, jigs wearing out, misalignment,
etc.  These were easy to fix, but this did slow down assembly, and
led to fabrication of jigs for the table saw.

I would be very surprised if anyone sold a "budget" super that
had dimensional tolerance problems sufficient to violate bee
space.  The "grading" of woodenware is more about the sinking
quality of board stock over the past 30 years than anything else.
(Yeah, sure - "sustainable lumber harvesting". Uh huh, and every
day at 4:45pm, pigs fly around in all those sustainable forests!)

That said, only words that cannot be spoken on this mailing list
can describe my complete disgust in the ongoing lack of a North
American multi-vendor standard that would allow interchangeable
woodenware, despite 3 highly detailed articles in "Bee Culture"
over the years that have shown that some vendors don't even respect
bee space when you stack their mediums on their deeps and use their frames!


                jim (I said "no" to drugs - they didn't listen)

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