A few years back when this composite decking started to catch on I’d just tell people to find someone else to work with. The trouble with trex is well, everything. One project in particular, a client had ended up with a field of nailheads hanging up all his deck furniture, spatter from messy painters, and the only straight edge in sight was where the deck met the house. The client wanted curves anywhere they would fit. It was an absolute nightmare. After the last contractor botched the job and walked off (I’m assuming in a fit of forgivable frustration) I had to recut a graceful curve into every remaining edge which was all of them, and by and by I became as well aquainted with this product as well as the guys in the lab cooking it up. Sharp edges tear out like stale bread, kerf marks take an eternity to sand out, it’s nearly impossible to route, plane, it burns more easily than wood, it rots, it swells, warps, bogs down your saw like Ipe or Ironwood, is not colorfast, cannot be nailed and sometimes arrives severly crooked warped or both. And just go ahead and try rounding over an edge. Furthermore, it requires narrower span widths in its subframe which means more stringers at the stairs and more wood in the rest of the frame. Trex has very little in the way of tensile rigidity because it contains no fibrous binder throughout it’s core. It’s plastic, glue, and wood pulp. You’d better have a lot of flat concrete real estate because if you try and store it high centered it’ll stay like that forever. A twenty foot length of 5/4” over an unusually tall person’s shoulder and it’s still practically at the ground at the low end of it’s wild occilating flex so you’d better carry two chattering sticks and go slowly to prevent them from jumping off your shoulder. If you don’t throw out your back getting it on the site, congratulations, you’re almost sure to do so getting it back on the rack when you eventually decide to return it. And be sure and tie it up good otherwise you’ll be responsible for the evening’s top story, tomorrow’s headlines, or both. Lastly, I hope you planned your deck’s size around Trex’ limited length selection or else you’ll be building a useless 5’ deck with all your cutoff or supplementing your bin on garbage day for weeks to come. Trex decides which lengths and widths are available to you. If you’ve already got it, return it, even if it means dragging it back to the store on the freeway one piece at a time and paying your 20% restocking fee. What can I say of a product that that costs as much as 4x that of it’s organic counterpart: It had better be four times as good right? Lifetime lumber is nothing like Trex or Evergrain or Veranda, or anything I’ve ever seen or worked with before. It shapes like balsa wood and yet curiously can be stricken directly with a frontal impact along it’s surface with no apparent effect. It’s surface is highly scratch resistant, and unlike Trex can be filled and painted nicely if severly gouged by a faulty caster, an absentminded and boozed-up relative with a swiss army knife bent on making a point. There is no such thing as an indestructable product, whenever I see something that says “unbreakabe” I immediately begin dreaming up ways debunk the claim, it is not impervious to people like us, but it will stand up to the abuses a deck ordinarily undergoes. Although I haven’t field tested this yet, I’d be willing to bet you could drop a number of hot coals right on it and be unable to produce any effect that could not be reversed with a can of paint. Unless you’re using solid plate metal as your decking, you’d be hard pressed to surpass the performance of Lifetime Lumber. It works like a very dense version of ridgid fiberglass insulation without all that unbearable squeaking, can be cut with dull carbide and produce no tearout. Can be handsawn, chiseled, and sanded smooth in a matter of passes. It’s porosity creates cavities that serve to provide a physical bond I’d liken to a root system for paint. It sounds like wood when you knock on it, It looks like wood when you look at it, and it cuts better than mdf, I’d say it will do to the world of compsite decking for us what mdf has done to the world of sheet goods. I had no trouble resawing two and a half inch stock in one pass on a popular and (somewhat underpowered) contractor saw. Nails and screws will grab and set, it can be toescrewed and nailed, it’s a stable and solid product, and in the absence of anything comparable in existance, I have no complaints and would give it a 7 out of 5. On top of everything I’m told it’s sustainable to boot, composed primarily of exhaust ash from coal-burning power plants, well I’d use it regardless… last time I checked coal is inert and isn’t ingested by any organism other than hospitalized teenagers. Well done Lifetime Lumber.
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