Board Feet? How to calculate

I want to give you a straightforward recipe that you'll never forget.

Thickness (in inches) x Width (in inches) x distance (in feet) divided by 12.

Got it? Good! So what is a board foot anyways? Well, it's the acceptable unit of portion in the North American lumber industry. A board foot is the equivalent of a piece of wood 1 inch thick, 12 inches wide, and 1 foot long. In other words, a board foot is 1 square foot of lumber, 1 inch thick. Any lumber item can be calculated in terms of board feet by using the recipe above.

So lets plug in a 2x4 that is 8 feet long okay? 2x4x8/12 = 5.333333 board feet (bf)

Now that you understand how to fancy one piece of wood, let's take it to the next level, because most habitancy who need to fancy have a large volume of wood. So how do you fancy that? Now let's work using "fbm" which is "feet, board measure" and this is used for calculating a volume of wood measured in board feet.

Due to the large volume of lumber traded in a typical transaction, the most coarse unit of portion is a "thousand board feet". Does this look familiar... A wholesaler faxes you information that says "I have 23 packages of 2x4x12' for sale at 5/M." So how do you fancy this?

The missing ingredient is the number of pieces in the packages. Here's a tip for you to remember... In North America, the acceptable sizes of packages (for 2x4) is 294 pieces. So we now need to add two more variables to our equation.

The recipe now looks like this. 2x4x12x23x294/12=54,096 fbm.

Hope this helps, and good luck!