(cut & pasted & snipped)
Thomas Cuny ) wrote:

See the Book "Understanding Wood, A craftman's guide to wood
technology"
ISBN 0-918804-05-1 by R. Bruce Hoadley

(pragmatist) wrote in message . com...


Arch,
You can find a partial list of the comparative strengths and bending
moduli of construction lumber in " Architectural Graphic Standards",
(not at all what the title promises, but an extensive primer on
building design and construction and well worth a trip to the
library).
Spruce was preferred for aircraft construction, and before that for
sailing ship masts and spars because of its high strength to weight
ratio and elasticity. It was not, nor is it now, the only wood used.
Birch is used extensively for wing ribs and sometimes in plywood along
with mahogany. Douglas Fir is sometimes used for spars.
When everything was made of wood, the characteristics of the various
woods were common knowlege, which has virtuallly disapeared today when
other materials are more used. ( Read "The Wonderful One Horse Shay"
for example).

donald j haarmann )
Subject: spruce wood in the Wright aircrafts
Newsgroups: sci.physics, sci.engr, sci.bio.botany
Date: 2003-12-17 14:47:22 PST


"Archimedes Plutonium"
Question: were the planes in WW1 made of wood? Was it spruce wood? Was
the German ace of Red Baron a wooden plane?


Run "Spurce Goose" though Google or same such. The worlds largest
wooden air craft.
---

Thanks for the references. I suspect all of the references in the
present literature were never really conducted as per a "full fledged
scientific analysis" and that the numbers achieved in all books on
wood to date are mostly
numbers got from less than a scientific laboratory would get.

I feel that the strength of oak exceeds that of hickory or ash just
from the ability of oak limbs to parallel gravity. I suspect that
hickory and ash are strong but not scientifically as strong as oak. I
suspect too much alterior motives in the books listed above that
provide number comparisons. For example, if someone from the Southern
states of the USA were to conduct a wood analysis
and owned a lumber yard which sold much hickory wood to northern
states would of course looked to make the hickory wood come out
superior to ash or oak.

Trouble with too much of the old literature on wood with number data
is that the testing was not done under Science Rigor. For example: if
I wanted hickory to beat oak and ash, I simply look for a great
hickory sample and look for a poor oak sample or a poor ash sample. To
get a hickory to beat out oak and ash is as simple as finding a
hickory with narrow tree rings to compare with oak and ash of wide
tree rings.

I have the hunch that if a Proper Scientific Analysis were done of
woods for their superior characteristics that most of the old
literature would be found flawed and that is because no-one has done a
proper Science testing.

Archimedes Plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies