Help! New England powder post expert needed

I am looking to hire a consultant with experience diagnosing powder post damage and developing potential remedies for my frame. I live in Massachusetts, near Boston.

This is in a single (I believe) pine 6"x6"x12', part of a frame addition I built from new timbers 5 years ago. The beam is exposed on two sides, and has visible pp damage along perhaps 2' of it. Unfortunately, part of the damage wraps around to an unexposed side, and toward and behind knee brace joint, so I can't just excavate to clean wood. I'd like to find someone with experience troubleshooting this kind of problem, who can take a close look and suggest solutions, either treating or replacement. The person would not need to be the same as the person doing the replacement, if that's the way we go.

Any suggestions? Any advice on whether to just go ahead and replace the beam?

thanks for any thoughts.--Richard

Hi Richard,

When "sounding" wood to find out whether it is sound or not just won't do. Search online for drills that measure resistance in wood. They are expensive but you can't beat them when wanting or needing empirical evidence.

When used they produce a graph with resistance in the y-axis and inches in the x-axis. It gives you a pretty clear picture of what is inside the faces. Small visual repercussions as well.

Hope this helps some. Perhaps you should find someone with one of these.

I think that I would first treat the affected area and stop the spread with a borate insecticide, like Timbor, it works best if no finish is on the wood so it can penetrate.

Post some pics so we can see the structure and the affected area. It could be that replacement would be the easiest and cheapest, saving diagnostics.

Powder post beetles like unseasoned wood or wet environments, so keeping moisture down can really help.

Here is a site with some good info that may be helpful:

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/Urban/ppb-wif.htm

I think I just attached a picture of the damage, looking up at the beam where it meets the knee brace, with PP damage excavated as much as possible.

I don't see powder post damage here, just white mold....
powder post beetles leave small holes in the wood, about the size of a 1 or 2 inch finishing nail.
To me this looks like moisture damage that has allowed white mold to grow.
not good.

No there is definitely insect damage, if you look at the enlarged picture you can clearly see insect bore lines. But to my (admittedly untrained) eyes, it looks like some other bug. I say this, because the boring seems larger than what a PPB might leave behind. I think the mold is there because moisture hung out in the damaged wood and gave it the opportunity to grow there, as is often the case. BUT, look at the top of the pine timber in that picture, the black staining is a clear sign of excess moisture.

I suspect what is happening here is your wood has gotten too wet, which made it susceptible to attack from larger insects as well as caused some rot of its own. The insect damage, in turn, gave the moisture somewhere to collect and hide, which led to the mold in that section.

Your real issue, I suspect, is indeed moisture. If you really want to fix the problem, than this issue needs to be solved.

How is the frame enclosed?

DLB

I didn't notice any PPB in that pic. What I saw was moisture damage.

Here is PPB in white pine from an 1801 barn:

DL, are you saying the white area has been eaten away by insects? I think I can see that in the blown up photo.

Yup, that's what I am saying, but not PPB. Looks like something bigger, and the trails are not unlike what a wood-boring ant might make, whi8ch would make sense if the wood already had moisture damage.

I find very similar damage in dead hickory out in the woods all the time, and usually there are ants nearby. In that case, it is a secondary invasion made possible by rot.

DLB

I does not look like mold to me. It looks like someone painted the area with a brush with white something to treat the "infected bug area". You can still see the grain of the wood through the paint, mold usually raises off the surface in a bulge, too. The off colored pine is from where the timber sat through the summer and is a variety of blue stain. I see a lot of it and in different stages of development. I do not suspect water damage, the dry wall look just fine, there would be some staining there as well. The bug paths do look like pine drillers/bores, maybe ants. If I have sawn logs with drillers in the log and left the lumber flat stacked for too long of a time you will see where the worm has come out from the wood and chewed along between the two boards leaving a similar pattern. But I don't know how this could have happened in this set up after the cutting of the frame. Was the tunneling present when the frame was cut?

Any chewing present from recent work, poo from the bugs? How big or small is the frass?

Tim, look a bit more closely at the picture.

In the white area, you can see that the white is in fact 3 dimensional. There are sections where it stands off in balls, like white mold will, and then a thin fuzz is spread out otherwise. The pattern of the balls and ridges is that of mold.

Also look closely at the darkened area. I thought too it was just blue stain, but looking closer at it it seems to be mildew instead. I say that for 2 reasons. 1: the color: it seems to be a deep brown-black, with little blue in it (take that for what it's worth, I know that color is affected by the picture and by my monitor's settings) 2: There are 'spots', many black circles, in the affected area, which is how mildew colonizes.

If you look elsewhere on the timber, there is certainly blue stain in this timber. So I could be wrong here. But to me it looks more like mildew...

If it were a condensations issue, not a water flow issue, I would expect to see the drywall in good shape. The water will collect on the coldest things present, which is going to be the wood, and it may not even be collecting in high enough quantities to be detectable to the casual observer, just enough to keep the wood damp would cause what I am describing, yet have no effect on the drywall.

To be clear though, I am not asserting that this must be the case here, I am just saying it is possible, and telling why. Like I said earlier there is no way I or anyone else can ever come up with an accurate scenario based on a picture, we would have to be able to see it to know for sure. All we can do is give you the information you need to be able to figure it out.

DLB

[quote=RichardR]I think I just attached a picture of the damage, looking up at the beam where it meets the knee brace, with PP damage excavated as much as possible.

Here in Richard's words he says the damaged area was excavated as much as possible. I suspect that it was excavated by a person, revealing the bug tracks/tunnels. Then painted with some solution. I also suspect if we had a bigger picture of the frame we would see more "blue" stain through out the frame.

I could also be mistaken, as well. I have used plenty of pine in various stages of "rot" reclaimed, if you will. It is even present on the cover of the latest issue of Timber Framing. There may even be a spot of ambrosia beetle present on the cover, in the wane on the top plate.

Tim, I suppose only the owner can tell us the case. I'd like to see some pictures of a larger area of the frame.

I don't generally like to see blue stain to that degree on an exposed face of a timber, and suspect few would.

Part of my reason for suspecting a rot issue is that it is unusual for ants or similar bugs to invade dry wood, they tend to go for weak spots, and in my experience they favor fungus-compromised wood.

Another possibility though is that there was some kind of beetle egg present in the sapwood before the frame was ever raised, and a lone larva ate its way to maturity. This of course would require the affected area to be sapwood.

Looking at the picture, I think you might be right about the white being paint, and the balling could just be a result of the paint mixing with the insect dust.

Thanks for all of your interest. some replies and clarification:

There is no white paint, or mold, on the beam in the photo. the bright white area is simply the exposed surface of the pine, where I excavated as much as I could. It may look odd because of the glare from the flash.

the beam is supporting a SIP roof, and an OSB-sheetrock panel wall. it does have bluestain, which was present when I raised it 5 years ago. I would bet a year's salary there is no moisture coming in from the outside the beam now.

I haven't isolated any insects. There have been no ants visible anywhere near here, and I am familiar (way too familiar!) with carpenter ant damage, and this isn't it. The frass is a very fine powder, which is why I thought PPB. The damage is active--I did the excavation because we saw new frass piles on the floor below the beam.

I think it's likely the insect was present at raising, though I cannot swear to it. my concern is about both the structural integrity of this beam, and the possibility of spread to adjacent ones.

any good advice on cutting the beam out? Perhaps I should start a separate thread on that.

thanks, Richard

I think, then, that it is a beetle larva that was present in egg form when the log was milled. Can you tell us whether or not the infected area is or is adjacent to sapwood? If so, that would support this theory.

If this is the case, then they are sapwood-eating beetles that will not continue to infest the wood. I see these things a lot in dead standing trees.

Bugger, could we have a better picture? If it is so bad the timber needs replacing a new picture would be nice before that happens.

I know if I leave boards, flitch, with live edges in piles there is a worm which gets in under the bark and will subside for a number of years. I believe in the cambium layer just under the bark. They will move around some. They are a different bug than the pine borer which will work its way through the log. They are smaller in size and leave a very fine power. Or they could be a stunted borer. How big are the bug channels?

Was there bark left on any of the timber? They could have migrated and came out there by the brace?

Keep an eye out for more frass.

If you look at old timber, usually in the cellar, you will find bug tracks on the wane, well some of them.