Thu, 14 Oct 2004 20:53:26 +0000 (UTC) Terry Harper wrote:

"Archimedes Plutonium" wrote in message
...

A weight test where a weight is placed in the middle of the board and
WhiteAsh
flexed off center by 145 mm and Hickory flexed 106 mm and Oak flexed 70
mm. So Oak
is clearly the strongest and not Hickory!

No, you've proved that Oak is the stiffest, not that it is the strongest.
You need to break the samples to find out which is strongest. A 4-point
bending test would be best.
--
Terry Harper

Is there a scientific definition of "strength" and "stiffness" where the two
concepts are clearly distinguished or are they a mix of one another?

For instance a bicycle tubing of aluminum versus steel where both hold up
weight but where the aluminum tubing is made oversized for stiffness. So now
if we add weight to these two bicycles and when they break do we call that
strength.

Another example is wire of steel or copper where they have stiffness
contrasts and they hold different weights before they break.

So is the concept of strength tantamount to the concept of " the point at
which it breaks under force"? So is the science concept of strength one and
the same as the point at which the item breaks.

I am not sure I want to break those boards.

Is there another test for strength other than breaking the boards?

I am not sure that strength as a concept is in isolation of other concepts.
So I wonder how many concepts relating to Strength there exists for wood? In
that stiffness is a dependent concept and Penetration is a dependent concept
of strength.

Come to think about it, if Breaking is tantamount to Strength then the
science concept of strength really is integral to the chemical bonds
involved. So that Chemical Bonds is responsible to strength and that to find
out which is stronger WhiteOak or Hickory we must analyze their chemical
bonds atom by atom.

And maybe I should be looking into the chemical bonds of oak wood compared
to hickory. Whether there are more powerful bonds in oak versus hickory.
Perhaps oak is stronger than hickory because it has more covalent bonds and
less hydrogen bonds than does hickory.

Has anyone done a chemistry analysis of oak wood versus hickory as per
chemical bonds. Stronger bonds would be those with fewer impurities.

As anything in science, the more you dig deeper, the more a ocean of new
things
opens up.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies