^ The older example you displayed in your first piece was most likely milled prior to 1970.
The younger, newer piece (on the left) was clearly milled much later.
The tree the older example came from may have been a large tree - perhaps 30-40 inch DBH (diameter breast height).
By the time a Douglas Fir has reached that size, it's sloughed off all of its lower limbs - in some cases up to 60-80 feet above ground.
That's where your "clear grain" Douglas Fir came from.
But those mills don't exist any more. There were three of them left: one up in Marysville, one down on the Columbia near Troutdale, and another somewhere (I can't recall.) They don't mill wood of that size today, as a general rule. The mills are no longer operating, and you have to have a special kind of guy to run a piece of wood through a saw that's six feet in diameter - it's no place for rookies. Most all those guys are dead now.
So most of the wood you see on the duals being hauled up and down Hwy 101 here is generally in the 14" - 18" DBH range - much smaller wood. The mills are now all set up with laser sighting and most of the operations are automatic - a computer sizes up the log and determines the optimum amount of cut lumber that can be extracted and goes to work. Not nearly as much waste now - and the chaff all goes into MDF panels now.
Another thing which comes into play is our climate and weather patterns: Your older wood grew in a cooler, wetter environment here in the west prior to 1970.
Since then, things have started to dry up a bit. Summers are longer here. Precipitation and snowpack levels are down. Temperatures are up.
So of course your growth ring patterns are going to look much different.
(Growth rings are generally spaced more widely on younger wood than on older.)
A couple points: Claims about "logging old growth" are ********. The mills simply don't exist to handle giant pieces of wood any more. You can cut the tree down, but good luck finding a mill in which to cut it up. A lot of noise is made about a non-existent problem.
IF you're in the market for old, clear-grain top-quality lumber, check out any number of "salvage" outfits that make it their business to reclaim and "recondition" that stuff and resell it.
"Earthwise Salvage" is but one of many outfits who are doing this. There are several of them in the Seattle area, because we have a LOT of old buildings constructed with wood framing that were built around the turn of the century.
