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?