An End-Cut Solution for Treated Wood

Dear Editor,

Hearing of the plight of the eagles battling with DDT as a child, the message really hit home recently after I lost a batch of home-brew to contamination with end-cut solution. I had been framing a deck all that week and applying liberal doses of the copper naphthenate-based solution via low-pressure sprayer. Normal hand washing apparently is inadequate and I have found it impossible to nail framing without eventually splashing some of the solution in your face. Pre-cutting and treating all the members before assembly isn’t really feasible.

I would like your opinion on an option I thought would enable me to treat all the framing cuts after assembly, at the end of the day optimally, using the sprayer to inject the solution into butt joints. This way I could wear the rubber gloves, not handle any lumber and keep myself out of the line of any over spray.

It would be nice if the chemical companies would produce an encapsulated strip 1

¹⁄

₂” wide which could be inserted in the butt joints and eventually saturate the exposed joint also eliminating the on-site contamination of drips and overspray.

Sincerely, Kevin Lane

After checking with a technical rep at CSI, we feel that your proposed solution would probably work, but it may be more complicated than necessary. The end kerf you describe would help get the solution into the joint, but is would also expose more untreated fiber to the elements, as well as possibly trapping moisture if water were to get into the joint. The copper naphthenate diffuses well enough that it should move in to the exposed area if you just spray it around the joint.Your suggestion of an encapsulated pad would be easy enough for them to do, because they already make a large version of it. A pad soaked in copper naphthenate or Sodium Fluoride is sealed in plastic and used to wrap the bottoms of utility poles as they are being set in the ground. The plastic is slashed to release the solution at the last minute. It does not appear, that they could make mini-pads cheaply enough for deck builders to use in every joint.