17 ms·
Testing the strength of different wood species
- Natsu 5y agoBetter ping Toady One and get him to add this info to Dwarf Fortress.
- scns 5y agoWithout reading the article (gotta be honest), Ipe should rate highly if they test it. It is very dense. Heavier than water, it sinks.
- swayvil 5y agoHey I was thinking about ipe too. Bugproof, toxic dust and smoke. Heavy as heck. So hard you break bits, dull blades. Beautiful color and grain. Looks like walnut. Got a piece in my lap right now.
- lostlogin 5y agoAustralian hardwoods are a bit like this. Jarrah looks amazing, is crazy heavy and sinks. New Zealand power poles are still sometimes Jarrah. Another odd one is old olive. I’ve had sections that when hit with an axe won’t split and bounce the axe. And seemingly remain unmarked. Splitting gnarled olive is miserable.
- esotericsean 5y agoSo cool to see Matthias here on HN. He has a ton of other articles and videos where he tests different things like this. I encourage you guys to check him out if you haven't.
- slig 5y agoMatthias is such an inspiration. A true hacker, I'd say.
- stcredzero 5y agoI remember that he was recently trying to get hired at a tech company. (He was doing something like an Arduino auto-targeting Nerf gun as a portfolio piece.) Did someone nab him? I remember the days when YouTube videos were automatically flagged as "shallow" by the HN code!
- Dma54rhs 5y agoWhat is or was HN code?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- unwind 5y agoThe software that implements the site and its functionality. It is, as far as I know, not open.
- stcredzero 5y agoIt was ported to Arc, which is a Lisp variant written by pg.
- bil7 5y agoMatthias is one of the most inspiring engineers I've come across
- irrational 5y agoI’m not surprised by Osage Orange. There is a reason it is prized by bow (as in archery) makers. Too bad they couldn’t do Yew too. That is another top bow wood.
- jimmyrocks 5y agoAfter watching this, I made the connection that the French "Bois d'arc" for Osage Orange refers to its use in bows. It turns out that Osage Orange really is one of the best woods for bows.
- tapvt 5y agoRelevant article from Texas Monthly regarding the history of Osage Orange: https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/osage-orange-history/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/osage-orange-histor...
- silisili 5y agoFor anyone who doesn't know or look this up, Osage Oranges are what we in the Midwest called 'hedge apples', those creepy alien looking green balls you'd see littered in yards.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoYou mean monkey brains?
- billti 5y agoIf you watch the linked video, six mins in he has a “bow score” based on strength and flex. Osage Orange was 2nd, after Dogwood.
- twic 5y agoThis guy calculates a "bow index", and reckons European Yew and Osage Orange are in a dead heat: https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/ https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/ But in the comments, someone identifies "speed of cast" aka "self-fling speed" (!) as the key metric for bow woods, and he doesn't have European Yew, but according to that, Pacific Yew and Osage Orange are also pretty much the same!
- walrus01 5y agoI wonder how the "wood" 3D filament which is particles embedded in a brown PLA would compare. PLA is generally quite weak, this filament is only suitable for ornamental things. https://all3dp.com/2/wood-filament-for-a-3d-printer-explained-compared/ https://all3dp.com/2/wood-filament-for-a-3d-printer-explaine... For the actual woods, I am not suprised by the ironwood. I once had a coffee table with an ironwood top and it was ridiculously dense and strong. also, did you know there's an ironwood smuggling problem internationally? https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ironwood+smuggling+indonesia https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ironwood+...
- almog 5y agoI would guess that much like MDF, PLA wood's strength is determined by the binding agent. My understanding of this product is that it's basically sawdust + PLA, whereas a wood's strength is stemmed (sorry!!) from its grain.
- mjb 5y agoPLA is not "quite weak". In fact, PLA's tensile strength is the highest of the easily printed materials (so excluding nylon and polycarbonate). Typical printed tensile strength of PLA is 40-60% higher than PETG, for example. PLA is also stiff, among the stiffest of common printing materials.
- Robotbeat 5y agoYeah, PLA, if you anneal it and use the right grade, has a strength to weight ratio the same as common Aluminum 3003 alloy, about 50MPa/(g/cc), which is also about the same as standard strength steel. It is quite strong for its weight. https://www.mmscience.eu/journal/issues/november-2020/articles/the-influence-of-annealing-temperature-on-tensile-strength-of-polylactic-acid/download https://www.mmscience.eu/journal/issues/november-2020/articl...
- walrus01 5y agoI do not have any experience using pla in an industrial setting. When talking about 1.75mm filament one can buy on a roll for a basic 3d printer, I can say I've printed a number of PLA things at 200-215C with appropriate slicer settings, speeds and such for beautiful looking output results, but all of them can be easily snapped in half by hand if I try.
- ilamont 5y agoThere's an episode of Grand Designs (season 10 or 11 IIRC) where the couple building the home chose Japanese larch for the cladding for their home in Wales. The specialist lumberyard used some sort of handheld tool to measure the density of the trees (harvested in Wales) and it was extremely strong ... but the show also noted the strength could vary widely from batch to batch, depending on variables such as age, soils, etc. Some details: http://www.cilfiegansawmill.com/forestry-wales/ http://www.cilfiegansawmill.com/forestry-wales/
- houzi 5y agoFrom what I've heard from experienced carpenters and wood millers, growing conditions are a huge factor, as you want slow growing trees that have compact tree-rings. Also if you can get a wood piece with the core wood running through the entire length, you'll have a stronger work piece.
- mauvehaus 5y agoThe strength of slow-growth vs fast-growth wood depends on the anatomy of the tree in question. Ring-porous woods (oak, ash) have (as the name suggests) growth rings that have a very distinct ring of pores running the length of the wood. That means that fast-grown oak or ash is actually stronger than slow-grown. As you look at a cross section of the wood, slow-grown wood has a much higher amount of void space than fast grown. As I understand it, the southern longleaf pines are the opposite. Because of how their growth rings are formed, they have alternate layers of more and less dense wood. Slow-grown has a higher percentage of the dense, stronger wood. On this point I'm speaking from reading, not firsthand knowledge. The only SYP we get up here in the northeast is pressure treated. PT works totally differently because it's so damned wet and I don't use much of it either way.
- l33tbro 5y agoThis is really fun - but isn't information about the janka of most species already fairly accessible online? [1]. I always assumed there was a slight degree of strength variance due to age, humidity of growth region, etc - but maybe having your own tester might come in handy for certain structural engineering cases where accuracy is crucial. [1] https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/janka-hardness/ https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/janka-hardness/
- thethirdone 5y agoI haven't checked, but I would assume the janka hardness of wood is not super tightly correlated with yield strength. I would expect a variation of 2x for a the janka hardness : strength ratio; some wood would be twice as strong or half as strong as you might expect from the hardness.
- wforfang 5y agoFor anyone who found this video satisfying, you may enjoy "Structures : Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" by Gordon.
- ggm 5y agoThis plus one thousand. Great book. "The new science of strong materials" is also good. (By the same author)
- icelancer 5y ago"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands." A favorite quote from these types of engineering analyses.
- WalterBright 5y agoHaha, so true. Structures can have multiples of strength for safety margins. Airplanes have 50%. Spacecraft - 10%. There's no way anyone is going to design spacecraft parts without being very good at math.
- bayouborne 5y ago“furniture designers, incredibly, are not taught during their formal training how to calculate the deflection in an ordinary bookshelf when it is loaded with books,” ― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down
- Gravityloss 5y agoFor weight constrained beam applications, both bending and compression failures are bending related (tension isn't). Since bending strength is proportional to the cube of thickness of a beam, wouldn't less dense materials in practice always win out since you can make the beam thicker? Ie the characteristic metric for beams would be stiffness / density^3
- ggm 5y agoThat qualification of weight constraint. Brick pillars have sufficient compressive strength to hold fantastic weight, steel or stone as much if not more so (the structural rigidity of the bricks will largely depend on the mortar and skill of laying the courses) so I think this is a peculiar niche to be in. Church roofs use heavy trusses, the compression load is a big part of building strength in flying buttresses and arches.
- xyzzyz 5y agoYou don’t need buttresses for trusses. A regular horizontal masonry wall will hold and transfer horizontal load just fine. Buttresses are for supporting lateral loads, created by the arches. Brick walls are bad at resisting lateral walls, which makes them them tip over, hence the buttress. Big wood trusses are more recent invention than arches, and they allowed to do away with buttresses.
- ggm 5y agoGood points but the key observation is to weight: wooden beam weight is not often a significant factor in the design of wooden truss roofs, compared to the strength. Is gluelam lighter?
- MatthiasWandel 5y agoTypically the beam has to fit where it needs to go. A lighter beam doesn’t mean you have room for a bigger one.
- zokier 5y agoOne thing that saddens me in the region I live is the lack of diversity in forests and therefore also in lumber selection. Quickly googling up some stats, 65% of forests are pine and 24% spruce. Only major hardwood would be birch (9% of forests), and its usually not available as lumber afaik. One of my dreams (in the category "if I were a billionaire") would be to buy some large piece of land and plant all sort of interesting trees to create a sort of fantasy forest.
- gotorazor 5y agoNot true. I used to work at a lumber company. If you're in North America, you can usually buy some kind of hardwood. For utility lumber, they probably can't tell you what kind of hardwood it is, but it will be hardwood.
- zokier 5y ago> If you're in North America, you can usually buy some kind of hardwood That's the thing, I'm not in NA, so pretty much any hardwoods available here are "exotic" imports.
- markdown 5y agoHow could they not tell what type of hardwood it is? In my (tropical) country, different timber looks very different, and anyone working in hardware or construction should be able to tell on sight what type of tree a plant came from.
- tupshin 5y agohttps://woodidentification.net/about/ https://woodidentification.net/about/ "Identifying wood is not easy for a number of reasons. First, there are hundreds of different species of trees in North America. Second, the wood of many species looks very similar, if not identical."
- gotorazor 5y agoIt depends on the purpose and grade of the lumber. I have worked an "exotic" lumber dealer that can definitely offer different species and grades of wood from all over the world -- including CITES (endangered species list) lumber with the proper certificates. But their customers are typically woodworkers that want a specific species for a specific look. So it's usually cabinet and furniture makers etc. I have also worked at a "discount" industrial lumber distributer. They are selling wood to be made into pallets or used at a construction site for bracing. In those cases, the hardwood species are a lot less important. The customer just needs something much stronger than the standard SPF. It's a fascinating industry. I learned a lot working that job -- even tho I was just implement their ERP systems.
- n-e-w 5y agoI respect all wood https://youtu.be/NTL30rkRYPo https://youtu.be/NTL30rkRYPo
- dalke 5y agoThere's an interesting connection between this and edge-notched punched cards (a special interest of mine), via a 1936 article in Nature (See https://www.nature.com/articles/137535a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/137535a0 .) Quoting Kilgour's "Origins of Coordinate Searching" at https://books.google.se/books?hl=sv&lr=&id=4crkFsx73msC&oi=fnd&pg=PA107&dq=Origins+of+Coordinate+Searching&ots=J0kzu-NhED&sig=j5go5BOIJAeYLPFr2nUIvN3hESQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Origins%20of%20Coordinate%20Searching&f=false https://books.google.se/books?hl=sv&lr=&id=4crkFsx73msC&oi=f... . > In 1936, S. H. Clarke, of Britain’s Forest Products Research Laboratory at Princes Risborough, published a brief note in Nature reporting on an unexpected observation: Detection of relations of ‘‘recorded features’’ on edge notched punched cards with a particular feature already sorted. > He had sorted a file of several hundred cards each listing a specimen of timber, by increases in specific gravity, and noticed ‘‘by glancing at the arrangement of the other notches . . . a distinct tendency for strength to increase with specific gravity’’ (Clarke, 1936, p. 535). He added that it was easy to recognize unusual correlations among notches. The spreadsheet plot in this video is essentially the same as the image in the 1936 Nature publication!
- agumonkey 5y agoWow, super neat system (i love forgotten analog techniques like these) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBwP3YOxw3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBwP3YOxw3I someone made a video about it
- dalke 5y agoWhen I came across that video last year I sent an email to the creator, but never got a reply. I made some of my own edge-notched cards using a computer-controlled stencil cutter. Here are some pictures - https://twitter.com/nathanbroon/status/750465911241502721 https://twitter.com/nathanbroon/status/750465911241502721 . I had the idea to present it at a Chaos Communication Congress. Then life (a.k.a having kids) intervened.
- mymythisisthis 5y agoIt depresses me that people can name more fictional T.V. characters than they can types of wood. We need to study nature more. Learn about materials.
- rcar 5y agoThere are far more fictional TV characters than there are types of wood. I'm a hobbyist woodworker and TV snob but could still many more characters than woods.
- mymythisisthis 5y agoIt's wasn't my best metaphor.
- pleb_nz 5y agoRegardless you are correct. I often wonder what society would be like if we treated engineers and scientists like we do sports and entertainment and what you said I think falls loosely to into that realm of thinking.
- geenew 5y agohttps://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:Crimes_of_the_Hot https://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:Crimes_of_the_Hot [Scene: Outside Conference Centre. Scientists from all over the world arrive. Photographers take photos of them and fans in the crowd wave papers for them to sign.] Woman #1: [shouting] Oh, God, I can't believe it! Woman #2: [shouting] I love you! [Farnsworth steps out of a limo. Joan Rivers' Head is commentating at the star-studded event.] Rivers: Oh, oh, oh! It's Professor Hubert Farnsworth! He's looking sharp in a standard white lab coat and dark slacks! His wristwatch is a Casio.
- throwaway984393 5y agoFunny that he didn't record the moisture content. Wood that's been properly seasoned gets both denser and stronger. If the pieces here didn't have the same moisture content they could be up to 50% off in terms of strength. Different uses of wood also require different moisture levels, at different times of their processing.
- imglorp 5y agoCame here for the moisture question. It would be an interesting dimension to his experiment. Note you can get a moisture tester at the box store for about $20; not a bad thing to have around if you do carpentry, burn wood, or have water problems in your house.
- ppg677 5y agoI would have liked to have seen Ipe wood tested. It is nearly twice the density as Red Oak, incredibly hard, and actually has a fire rating in the same category as concrete. https://www.wood-database.com/ipe/ https://www.wood-database.com/ipe/
- iandanforth 5y agoDoesn't the orientation and placement of the cut for each piece of wood have a huge impact on strength? If you've got a quarter sawn piece from heartwood you're going to get very different mechanical properties than plane or rift sawn sapwood. This and the orientation of the pieces in the tester doesn't seem to have made it into the post or the data sheet.
- johnwalkr 5y agoFrom the pictures and by conventions of woodworking, these samples all seem to have the wood grain aligned to the major axis. They are also free of knots. It would be interesting to see, at least for a few species, how the placement of cut affects the results.
- WalterBright 5y agoAround Seattle, madrona trees are indigenous. They are very strong, and are preferred to hold hills in place. There's one on my property that is gigantic and leaning at a 30 degree angle. It's been that way forever. It must be fantastically strong to hold that weight through storm after storm. I wonder how they compare.
- throwaway984393 5y agoI think a tree holding a hill in place is more a factor of soil, root structure & precipitation than the wood strength. Shallow roots, loose soil: not gonna hold much. Deep roots, compacted or rocky soil: basically reinforced concrete. Whether it's more dry or waterlogged probably changes it too. Also, if the tree grew slanted, it would actually be unusually strong in that position compared to a tree that was shifted into that position.
- WalterBright 5y agoI was told by many workers that cutting a madrona would dull your saw in short order.
- davidjytang 5y agoThe very much sought-after and difficult to get wood in my area is Japanese cypress. Now I'm curious how it would fair in the ranking.