This wood breaks screws and bends nails....

I really question if you comprehend the type of wood I'm talking about. The contemporary pine is like butter by comparison...

> This wood breaks screws and bends nails

While driving the fastener, or over time while the structure settles?

Either way, I can't see how this is a problem with the wood itself. The structural design and material properties have to be specified in a compatible way. The only three options are the spec is wrong, the materials are out of spec, or the engineer considers it a non-issue.

While driving. Takes a noticeable amount of work to run it through a table saw compared to what you'd pick up nowadays.

I had it backwards. I thought you meant the new wood is bad because it breaks fasteners.

In any case, is unnecessary to use wood like that.

What species, what country? Because absolutely no softwood in North America does this. You can run Deckmates into the oldest pine you want all day.

(And hardness has little to do with the strength or survivability of a constructed building.)

North Central coast BC, looks and smells like fir

And it absolutely 100% does, as I've had it happen to me many times. It also gives circ saws a hell of a time.

Don't know how to prove this given that's an 18 hour drive from me and she's not currently doing renos....

Yeah it's fir, I'm next door to you in southern Alberta. You'll find it in older houses, I keep it whenever I come across it.

Yea I'm wondering if we just had more of it left more recently than the Yanks and thus most of them have absolutely zero clue about this as they literally had zero of this type of material in any of their old construction aside from historic homes with listed status...