Resting lumber on small cross-sticks to create air spaces is about seasoning wood through air-drying. By placing thin stickers between layers, air can move through the stack, pulling moisture from the wood evenly and reducing the risk of warp or checking. This specific method is called sticking (often also called stickering). It’s different from simply stacking, which is just piling boards without deliberate air gaps, and from kiln-drying, which uses a heated chamber for drying, or from the general idea of drying itself, which is the end result rather than the method.

Tensile strength describes how much pulling a material can withstand before it breaks. When a component is pulled from opposite ends, it experiences tension, and the material’s tensile strength is the maximum stress it can endure under that pulling before fracturing. This concept is key for things like cables, ropes, and wood fibers loaded in tension, where resisting breakage under pull is essential. Compressive strength, by contrast, is about resisting being squeezed or crushed, not pulled. Shear strength concerns resistance to sliding between joined surfaces or layers under a shearing load. Bond strength relates to how well surfaces or materials stick together, i.e., adhesion, rather than the material’s resistance to breaking under a pulling force.

Stretchers describe the blocks used most often in CMU walls. They are laid so the long, rectangular face is visible on the wall, which gives you the familiar CMU shape. If a block is turned so the short end faces outward, that is a header, used to tie wythes. Jambs are blocks used around openings like doors and windows, and columns refer to vertical structural members, not the typical wall surface. So the common CMU units you see forming most walls are stretchers.

Understanding why hammer action matters in drilling helps explain this. A hammer drill is built to combine rotation with rapid hammering at the drill point. The hammer mechanism delivers a high number of blows per minute, up to around 50,000, which creates a percussive force that chunks away masonry like concrete or brick. That steady hammering is what makes drilling into hard materials much faster than a plain rotary drill, which simply spins the bit without any pounding action. Rotary drills rotate only, so they don’t deliver those hammer blows at the drill point. Impact drills do add percussive action, but they’re designed for different tasks (often high-torque driving or lighter percussion) and don’t match the specific high-frequency hammering used for masonry drilling. The term related to grip style, pistol, describes how the tool is held rather than how it operates. So, the reason this describes hammer drills is precisely that they provide that high-speed hammering action at the drill point to efficiently bore into masonry.