I have noted over the years that the folks in the Eastern US and
Eastern Canada find spruce, pine and fir to be rather rare and
expensive, while they have an abundance of hardwoods like oak, ash,
walnut and so on, so much that they use it for firewood. Out here in
the West, we burn the softwoods and can't get the hardwoods at any
decent price. Many of us, when building boats or furniture, have cut
up hardwood pallets to get the small bits of hardwood we need. We
can't feature Eastern factories using wood for pallets that we pay $10
a board foot for.
When I was a kid my father worked in a sawmill, and any amount of
clear softwood could be had just by picking through any pile of
lumber. Those days are gone (sob) and now I cringe when I look at
the basement structure of some old house, with all that clear fir. Out
here in Alberta there are numerous huge aircraft hangars built during
WWII on training airfields, made of fir beams measuring something like
6" by 24" and 12"x12", and sixty feet long. Clear, for the most part.
Old grain elevators are being torn down, and the lumber (laminated
2x6, 2x8, 2x10) reclaimed for fancy flooring and window frames in
upscale houses. Lumber cut from trees in the 1920s when they were
still taller than Paul bunyan.
In the 1970s I sold heavy truck parts, and a firm in India made
the best cast-iron brake drums we'd ever seen. North American
manufacturers made them of softer iron (which wore out much sooner)
and stored them outside so they got all rusty and filthy. The Indians
wrapped them in plastic, with dessicant capsules to keep them dry, and
boxed them two to a crate made of TEAK, believe it or not. It's junk
over there. Some of it found its way into my furniture projects.

Dan