Just an FYI ... osage is pronounced with a long a as in 'sage advice' ... at least where I I live here in Missouri ... Missouri farmers used these so separate sections of land and fields because they grow very dense, very thorny, and grow intertwined keeping cows in without the need to put of fencing and were very easy to plant. Also, the Osage Orange originated from southern Missouri where Osage Indians used them exclusively for making bows. This is probably TMI but thought what I'd read was interesting and I think it's pretty wood .. so I'd share the information. BTW I liked the real time footage of you feeding of pieces into the planer : )
As an hobbyist bowyer you're pretty much spot on for bow woods. Osage orange is generally considered one of the best bow woods. High-quality yew is usually considered the ultimate bow wood, but it's very rare. Elm, dog wood, and ash are pretty popular too.
We also see that in history. The ancient greeks prefered dogwood for spears, javelins and bows, while the vikings prefered ash. Carriages and early cars, where also often made from ash. As was quite a few early aircrafts.
In my neck of the woods persimmon is the close equivalent of osage orange. My uncle told me it was great for hoe & rake handles and for wedges (when splitting rails) because of its toughness.
Here in Flanders (Belgium), windmill builders always used the wood of Cornus sanguinea (Dogwood) for the spokes of a lantern transmission. So centuries ago, mill builders knew they had to use Cornus in a transmission because of the strength of this type of wood. And they had no "wood strength testing machine". Great video Matthias.
Oh, they very much had a wood testing machine. It was the application itself. And previous builds with different apparent most suitable types, I'm guessing. There is no kind of testing for the application like the application. :-) Also, you can get a pretty good idea just bending smaller sections by hand to failure. And one of the main strength differentials in wood is grain. I expect if you go look at those members you will find very straight grained long grain termination woods were chosen. Those guys were not REMOTELY stupid. Anybody who ever built structures using rain forest woods probably went insane considering just the amount of different species of wood available. :-) Interesting data point, thx.
I've read that Dogwood was traditionally used for wagon wheel hubs due to its abrasion resistance. This might be an idea for future testing. This feature would come into play for things like drawer slides or rockers etc. Another idea might be fastner holding power, as in, the force required to pull a screw or nail. I really like the testing for unusual/ non-commercial species of wood.
Osage orange is also called Bodark / Bois d'arc, which as I understand is French for "bow wood". Historically, Osage people would make bows out of it. It's also has the highest thermal coefficient of any North American wood. It burns so hot it has cracked some stoves.
👍🏻 checks out Maclura pomifera has been known by a variety of common names in addition to Osage orange, including hedge apple, horse apple, the French bois d'arc and English transliterations: bodark and bodock, also translated as "bow-wood"; monkey ball, monkey brains, yellow-wood and mock orange. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclura_pomifera
Hi Matthias, I really enjoyed this video, and I love your bend testing machine. I'd like to make one someday for myself. A few points I'd like to bring forward: A better bend test is a four-point bend test, as this distributes stress evenly along the length of the sample rather than focusing it in one place. The benefit of this is that if there happens to be a slightly weaker point at or near the centre, a 4PBT will accommodate it while a 3PBT will not. Essentially, the 4PBT gives you a true average of the strength acros the whole sample, while a 3PBT tells you the strength right at the centre. In bowmaking, the value of a species or sample of timber for bowmaking is not its stiffness, nor its mass, but it's allowable working strain. The working strain is the elongation/compression that elicits a given (small) amount of plastic deformation. For example, Yew is an excellent bow wood because it's working strain is around 1.0% (a poor bow wood will have a working strain of about 0.6%). Interestingly, two bows made of different timbers with similar working strains, but different densities, will have a similar mass... *despite* their density (and almost certainly stiffness) being different. For those who may be interested, I wrote a series of posts about bend testing timber for making bows here: ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=5450 And I wrote a bit about how to categorise and rank the merit of species of wood for bowmaking here: ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=13765
Hello, I went to the traditional bowhunting site and was surprised to find out there are actually formulas when building a wood bow. Very interesting and complex. You probably won't see this question but will ask it anyway. This isn't about which is the best bow wood matter of fact the wood I'm looking for probably would make a lousy bow. What type(s) of wood would you recommend that is very springy and has the greatest bend (10' long and bending almost in half) before it breaks over multiple bendings? Would this wood continue to exhibit these qualities after a period of time and drying? The properties would be more like a living green sapling that resists breaking because of its flexibility. I demonstrate primitive trapping and have little access to small fresh-cut saplings and hope there is a type of wood that will work from year to year. My email is under the about tab when you click the red circle. Thank you.
Sitka spruce. We build airplanes with it. Strong, light, and stable. Douglas fir is also crazy strong, but it's heavier. Our propellers are made from hard maple. Very tough, very strong, buy when it fails, it shatters. Love your testing device!
@@HondoTrailside It is as long as the moisture content of the wood doesn’t get too dry. For example the Sitka spruce used on piano soundboards can form cracks along the quarter-sawn grain when a piano is not stored in a controlled environment that maintains appropriate temperature and humidity levels. Older pianos are even more susceptible to cracked soundboards since the fibers in the wood have naturally degraded with age and don’t have the strength to tolerate wild changes in humidity levels or temperatures. Dust that accumulates on the soundboard has a tendency absorb moisture out of the wood and cause it to dry too fast, causing cracks to form over time. Piano manufacturers tend to quarter saw the Sitka spruce for the soundboards to not only resist the tendency of warping and cracking but to also produce a superior high quality sound output for their instruments.
Sitka Spruce has many uses but making a bow is not one of them. The Modulus of Rupture is too low. Being light in weight is not a top priority for bow woods. You want a low Modulus of Elasticity (springy) with a high Modulus of Rupture (bending strength).
Osage Orange is an amazing wood. Such a neat pre-historic tree. Even better for bows than the legendary English Yew. Grows naturally in such a small area of North America in Texas and Oklahoma and just a tiny part of Arkansas
We had it on our farm in south east Nebraska. Prized as an excellent fence post because they would never rot. Not at all straight though. Makes for a crazy looking fence.
Ohioan checking in, I probably have 30+ Osage oranges in my fence row. It is strange though because if you look up a map of where they grow many do show an area similar to the one described by the original comment.
Very interesting. Thanks for this. Grain orientation would affect results considerably as would grain runout over the length of the test piece. Now, we'd love you to do the same test with riven wood, with force applied with grain vertical and grain horizontal. No rush.
This kind of information is surprisingly hard to find and very useful for woodworkers. Thanks for all the tedious work testing this and sharing the information.
Back in the 90s I did some work for Team Aircraft, and when I visited their factory, that was basically the system they had for testing the spar wood they put in their aircraft kits. Except, they had a frame like yours but contained within it was a bathroom scale and a bottle jack, that simple. I didn't see your earlier video, but I gather you also tried that. This new machine is incredible.
If you calculate the cross section moment of inertia you can find out the tensile strength. Since all the samples are the same it should be rather easy to include in the spreadsheet
@@niske The material strength formulas apply in the elastic range and not at break. Matthias' test is very interesting and impressive to compare woods. However it would be necessary to know the admitted load without the sample remaining deformed once the load has been removed. Young's modulus or elasticity modulus only applies in the direction parallel to the grain. It is between ice and brick for most woods except bamboo.
It would be bending strength, not pure tensile strength. Although you could argue all the samples failed in tension, it's really not a pure tension test.
Wow, That is a LOT of data! Thank you for taking the time to be so complete. I am always impressed with your level of detail. I really enjoyed your mouse trap videos as well as your joinery tests. It has been a pleasure to be a subscriber for all these years. Thank you!
There was quite a section in the Boyer's bible on this topic. This is awesome info for that hobby. I'm betting there are lots of video links getting spread through bow making forums right now. You make some great content Mathias!
One thing missing from your bow analysis, which was very great so thank you, was compression and tensile repetitive stress in wood. From what I’ve read, osage is great in both. Elm is great in tension but the micro-fibers crush and permanently deform in repetitive compression resulting in the springiness and draw weight of the bow to degrade. Interestingly, makers of ancient Holmegaard bows seemed to know this and made design decisions minimizing wood in compression
Such a fantastic resource you are, Matthias. Thank You. Just curious, were the samples stored in your shop long enough to have had similar moisture content? I imagine in the winter there the humidity is quite low.
I know you are not a "BOW MAKER" but your a "MAKER" and a fine one. You can make awesome. Make a bow Please. Two kinds as noted above. It will get tons if views all of yr subs and all the subs of bow videos. Plus yr skills and input would help alot of folks Please make a bow. A basic board bow then using ur skills a laminated one would be even better using ur wood data against common woods use for bows. It would be greatly interesting and would be entertaining and knowledgeable...then test them via.speed , power, ease making and anything else
@@kendion4597 Bows are hard from what I'm told! They seem to require a different mindset to most other things. I've no experience personally, but a friend of mine is an archer and I asked her :) She said that most fletchers and other bow-adjacent folks don't make anything else! Bows take a lot of time and dedication and specific knowledge it seems. I doubt he has an interest in gearing his entire operation to making bows for youtube and giving up income from other sources for the time it would take to be "youtube-good-enough".
Very interesting as always! Just a quick tip that others have probably mentioned. Osage is pronounced OH-sayj with a soft "g"... the same as sage. It gets its name from the Osage people, a native American tribe of the great plains. They would travel sometimes hundreds of miles to locate this tree for their bows, so your findings align with their experience. Colloquially, I grew up knowing this tree as "horse apple." It's extremely rot-resistant, and is probably the best heating wood in North America.
Hi, Matthias - We lived in Missouri, outside of St. Louis, a km or less from the Femme Osage river. There were lots of "Osage Orange" trees along the river's path, down past the Daniel Boone homestead to the Missouri River.
Young Osage orange trees can be coppiced, whereas you cut the tree close to the ground and many new shoots will emerge and grow thickly. This can form a fence which is said to be bull strong, horse high and hog tight.
What a fun project! Two questions: 1) What kinds of podcasts does Matthias listen to in the shop? 2) Would grain density at the test point have an effect on the penetration force result?
I made a bow from Thuja (my neighbours have one side of their property lined with thuja bushes). The wood is insanely good for bows, BUT finding one that isnt twisted or twisted in a way that you can work with it is almost impossible. But i had so many Thujas to chose from so i found some good staves and made two bows out of the ones that stayed straight after seasoning. I cant stress enough how good hazel is for learning how to make bows. You can find them everywhere, you can work on them when they are still fresh, you can make high quality bows out of seasoned hazel wood if you have the patience, and most importantly they are available in abundance almost everywhere in EU and North America. Hazel is insanely flexible and stores the energy quite well. Only downside is that its not as strong when it comes to compression. This can be worked around with using a suitable limb cross section design though. Hope my 2 cents help someone
Hello Mr. Wandel, thank you for a great demonstration, and the machine you built to measure the amount of force necessary to break the different species of wood is amazing. I appreciate your wooden gears and being able to measure the forces and plot graphs on your laptop.
I am very happy to see this data collected! I have had a passing interest in the strength to weight measure because of homebuilt aviation. Apparently many wood airplane designs are engineered using softwoods (particularly sitka spruce) because of their "superior strength to weight". However, by playing around with some numbers from the Wood Database, one can easily find that Shagbark Hickory, Black Locust, White Ash and Black Walnut all give excellent strength for their weight despite these first two being among the densest woods in the US. I would love to see you give a broader test comparing more samples of some of these highest strength woods against a broad sample of the common softwoods, especially those used in aviation (spruce, Douglas Fir, Birch). Sitka spruce in particular has become difficult to source and expensive so it could be very helpful for homebuilt/ experimental/ amateur engineers and builders of all walks. Also, I understand that grain orientation and density can create great variability in these tests. Not just grain angle vs force vector, but end grain and ring orientation, ring density (may even be backwards in "ring porous" hardwoods from "diffuse porous" softwoods). so a lot of variability to watch for in your testing. However or whatever you choose to do with you test rig, keep up the good work!
I would love to see you test some of the antipodean timbers from Australia and New Zealand such as Jarrah which is quite incredible and Kauri and heart Rimu and Kahikatea and some Asian ones like Kwila and Teak and Acacia and Gaboon/Merbau etc. This data is awesome. When our boat was built dad tested samples of plywood with a round lead ball dropped from about 1m high with the ply resting on dirt/grass - on all plys except the one we ended up using it went through, off the one we used it bounced. Indeed the hull got a few big hits over the years and always survived with no damage or localised damage that was easy to repair :-)
Do it yourself. His system is amazing but it is way overkill, at the aircraft factory i was associated with they just used a welded frame like his, a bathroom scale and a 10 dollar bottle jack. But obviously a wood frame works also. Also, look up spine tester. Gives you stiffness info which is more relevant anyway. With stuff like spars of boats and planes, and musical instruments, and arrows and bows, or floors, what you want to know is how much can you get out of them without them flexing beyond an accepted tolerance. You don't want them to break so testing them to failure is way past what you want. So for instance joists are sold as 240, 360, and 480. That is the amount they deflect over a given span, under the given load. so over 480 inches that spar would deflect 1 inch while the 240 would deflect one inch over 240 inches under the same load. The point being the deflection is way less that in a test to destruction.
It would be interesting to see a test of Lilac. I know it’s not seen as “woodworking lumber”, but it’s very hard and can grow to at least 10 cm in diameter, as far as I’ve seen here in southern Sweden. (I tried to cut one down with an ax, but it was impossible, so I became curious, and now I have saved a few logs for drying.)
The wood is also often quite patterned and pretty. Similarly, another common Scandinavian garden tree is Laburnum (Gullregn), which has a reputation for being pretty tough, historically being used for fence posts and bows.
@@CrimeVid I second your statement. It turns beautifully on a lathe. I describe the effort as creamy. Have clean hands when handling after turning as it gets dirty instantly. I made some file handles with it.
I would be very curious to see how these turned out as a bow. Something to keep in mind is that many many woods considered sub par can be used when laminated with another wood as well. This has been done historically too, which is nice for the primitive bowmaker types.
Very interesting tests! One additional factor to consider alongside strength when choosing a wood for a project is availability. For example, in the UK and most of Europe, elm is sadly almost non-existant and so not readily available (and what is available is very expensive).
Great experiment, very useful regarding the price of wood. It is certainly wise to look at your chart before buying any wood for a specific project. Thank you much. Merci beaucoup.
This reminds me of how wagon wheels were built with different woods for different parts, springy wood for the spokes, wood that was resistant to splitting for the hubs, and possibly just tough stuff for the fellies, but I'm not so sure what was what
@@victorhopper6774 Persimmon is good for hubs, doesn't split easily, also used for giant mallets and splitting wedges. Post oak as another wood with spiral grain, I rather pound sand than try to split it.
I’ve been building my own bows over the last couple years. As I was watching this I though, “dang I wonder what bowyers would think of this” and then you talk about bows. That was pretty cool. I only make 3 piece take down bows now and I use fiberglass. But the first bow I made in high school was a hickory board bow. It for sure breaks with a bang. I didn’t have the grain running the right way and it snapped in half on one of the limbs. Cool video, thanks
As a young student studyingmaterial science i found that generally hardwoods ( from a flowering plant/tree) had tesidualt strangth after reaching the yield point snd continued to carry a moderate load even ehen splintering. Softwoods ( eg from conifers, non flowering specias) failed catastrophicly and had little load bearing after splintering. We tested native Eucalypt species, conifers (Pinus sp.) and exotic hardwoods ( Quercis Sp.
The natural lamination of Yew makes a good bow. Osage with purple heart is also a good mix, you can insert a piece of ash in the middle or just ash as a flat bow will work well.
I heard that English Bowmakers would split the Yew so they had the flexibility of the sapwood and compression of the heartwood. As you say White Knight,, Natural lamination.
Great stuff as always. I once was told that natives in Canada would make bows using black spruce that slowly grew I’m harsh places. The tight grain would make it suitable for bows. Related to that, it would be interesting to see how lamination affects strength and flexibility, according to the number of layers. Cheers.
Excellent video as usual, thank you. I would like to see you testing Paulownia (empress tree). It is a lightweight tree but still it's said to be pretty strong and would be perfect for furnitures if only the surface was harder.
Another important thing for making bows is that the wood has to be able to return to its original state after being bent. That is an important consideration and one of the reasons why osage is so good for bows. It doesn't take much set and it is very strong relative to its admittedly high weight.
Great video, very interesting demonstration! Have you considered doing strength tests based on the way the wood is processed? I have heard that split or riven wood can be stronger than sawn wood. The theory being that splitting the wood preserves longer and more continuous wood fibers verses sawn wood which can sever wood fibers as they intersect the cut. So the more fibers running the full length the stronger the wood, in theory.
That sounds very unlikely to me to have significant impact. At most that would be a surface level difference, which would be effectively negligible. And if you refine the surface in any way (scrape, sand, plane, etc.), that would go away entirely. Basically, imagine you have two bundles of same length plastic tubes (like those in lollipops), each tied together tightly with inelastic strings. Sample one, you stick a metal ruler in the middle, creating two distinct halves in the bundle. Tie each half up with the same inelastic string, then epoxy each half. Those are your riven or split equivalents. Bundle two, just epoxy everything together from the start, take it to the band saw and cut it in half. That is obviously your sawed wood analog. Sure, you're gonna nick a few tubes there, but how many could you possibly have been nicked to matter? Now imagine the tubes are even smaller in diameter, were all much more irregular, never fully straight or the full length of the original bundle - that is wood in a nutshell.
@@louisvictor3473 You are correct, if the cellulose fibers in your lumber are as straight lollipop sticks or soda straws and totally parallel to the face. Unfortunately, more often the cellulose fibers in wood are are very sinuous. You can see that in this video at the 4:01 mark and many other places. For example, the sample at the 1:50 mark shows grain running (curving off the edge) out at almost 45% to the face. When wood is processed by splitting it breaks along the weakest part, the lignin, which binds the cellulose fibers together. Splitting leaves the full length of the cellulose fibers in tact, but a very sinuous and undulating surface which follows the grain. Sawing, on the other hand, severs both the lignin and cellulose fibers intersecting the path of the blade.
As was recently discussed in Patrick Sullivan's end gluing video the lignin bond is much weaker than the cellulose. So maintaining continuous strands of cellulose is much stronger than shorter cellulose lengths that rely on more lignin to hold everything together.
I would be interested in seeing cut resistance and abrasion resistance tests. Also, if you can get your hands on any, live oak (an evergreen oak species from the SW USA) it would ba an interesting wood to test like you did these and for the other tests I mentioned. A fair warning, though: it is very damaging to cutting implements. Anything that isn't carbide tipped it will dull with surprising speed, even hardened tool steels, like the blades for plaining machines and chainsaw teeth. It was used heavily in the wooden shipbuilding industry since it is strong, plentiful, rot resistant, and typically grows curved so it is ideal for ship structures since it requires no bending and less joinery. I pity those that had to chop them down with hand axes, though, since they had to constantly sharpen their tools and steel saws fair even worse.
Not sure if anyone has commented on it, but breaking strength will not be accurate in sawn wood if the saw doesn't exactly follow the grain of the wood. The best way to test the wood would be to rive (split) our the pieces, so that the grain is never violated. Not sure, but the moisture content of the wood might effect strength as well. Nevertheless, nice test!
Pretty interesting testing and results, Matthias! 😃 I wonder if straight grain vs whatever makes much of a difference. Anyway, happy holidays! And stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Amazingly interesting! I've got a bunch of dogwood in my garden, but never even considered it to be a productive plant. I have them for esthetics (the smaller branches are bright red in the winter) and because they make for excellent hiding spots for yard birds and bird feeders... It grows so easily once it takes root, so now I'll have to look into changing my cutting plans for this winter. I'll scrub some of the willow and ash and replace them with dogwood now. Funnily, the dogwood bushes are also the favorite place for my dogs to lie in the shade in the summer time!
Matthias, are you measuring motor current (torque) to deduce force? If that is a triangular thread, the friction torque would increase with applied load. An ACME thread or at least greasing it would minimize this potential measurement error. If you have a load cell in compression that sees the force applied to the wood directly, then ignore the above.
As always, good content. It is a great starting point to figure out the properties of different woods, but to make it a more accurate test one would need more than one sample of each wood species, 5 to 10 of each? And to make it a valid test on the species, each sample should come from different trees (of the same species of course), but getting all of those samples would be very hard.
Teak wood is worth considering it's regarded as strongest wood for making furniture in India. The best is considered Central Province Teak wood as it has much less moisture in it compared with African varieties.
Growing up on the farm, I hated fence mending. In particular, I hated repairing wire fences where someone had installed hedge (Osage Orange) posts. These posts were almost always as big around as your thumb, too hard to drive a staple into and also too featureless to securely attach new wire. We usually replaced them instead. They, however, were exceptional firewood - for they had cured in the sun for more than fifty years.
Fantastic work Matthias! If only you were in Australia and could have a go at putting our local timbers to the test.....whilst not as spectacularly figured as the European and American timbers, I still think they are unbeatable for structural applications.
I'm wondering about the effect of kiln drying on your results. The dark woods may be more likely kiln dried as they were more likely bought from a supplier then home sawn
Did you have any Yew wood to test? Yew was traditionally used for longbows in the UK. It also used to be used for furniture because of the flexibility but also in lutes. It's a relatively uncommon wood these days owing to the mature trees tend to be hollow and the wood has plenty of knots. Elm is an interesting wood, heavily affected by Dutch Elm disease but was traditionally used for making boxes and coffins, it's not as strong as Oak but it has a denser interlocked grain which in your test exceeded Oak in the bend test.
This test is unique in the internet. I have to make a copy. In the first moment I thought hainbuche or hornbeem is missed but it will be the yoke elm. I know it as a very tough wood. For a hard surface there is a possibility but it is not wood, it is bamboo. It is used for parquet.
Depending on shipping and whether I have correctly sized pieces left, I might be able to send you some live oak. From what I've been able to find, it's the third densest wood in the US/Canada behind desert ironwood and mountain mahogany. It was used extensively in ship building, and is an absolute pain to work with, so it might do pretty well
I just looked up the numbers, and on average live oak is pretty close to Osage Orange when it comes to density, it would be interesting to see how other characteristics compare.
Osage Orange makes great posts for barbed wire. We more commonly call them hedge posts. With age, they get so tough that it becomes impractical to drive a staple into older posts. It's the toughest wood I've seen.
For the use as bow wood: How dry were these wood samples and how were they dried? Kiln dried wood is only usable for some species, while a slower drying process makes a lot of wood species more suitable.
A very simplistic and short sighted way to test timber strength and suitability. In practice it's really not that simple. What you need is a timber that resists shock loads and has toughness combined with flexibility. There are plenty of timbers I know that would test well on this device but would not be best suited to chair making. But amateur's love reinventing the wheel so now they are reinventing timber. Lol.
Sitting near a dogwood bow stave I've let air dry for years. They tend to take a bit more set than other bow woods, relevant to that last note about it's deformation verses Osage, which takes very little set unless heated.
Great video. I'd love to see similar testing for the species that are usually discarded as junk. Cottonwood, basswood/linden, etc. Maybe they'll prove stronger than people think, or have some characteristic that is useful to hobbyists.
I suspect that you kept the grain orientation consistent throughout your testing while placing the different wood in the stress testing machine. My question is about which way the grain was oriented when strength testing. Was the board placed in a flat sawn position? (ie: grain horizontal with the table) or in a vertical grain pattern? (ie: the grain perpendicular with the table) I've no doubt you are well aware that attempting to break a piece of wood is much easier across the flat sawn direction & considerably more difficult against vertical oriented grain. I am very curious as to which way you placed the wood in your strength testing jig. A good example of this is when hafting an axe, the ideal grain orientation for the handle is with the grain running parallel with the axe head When looking at the end of the handle you can clearly see which direction the grain runs. Thanks.
I would think that straight grain would be an important factor in a bow. I thought that is why Hickory was used. I guess you would need to split the logs into billets for testing, but that might not allow for reducing variables between species.
Straight grain does matter if the bow doesn’t have any backing. I made a bow out of a hickory board when I was in high school, the grain wasn’t perfectly straight and it snapped when I was trying to see how it bent on the floor. Clay Hayes has some really good videos on building self bows, if you wanted to watch something like that. Not really sure what the protocol is, I don’t comment much on TH-cam.
Love your work ! Question ...might i make a 12'' riser block for my delta band saw , by laminating hickory flooring or planks ? im open to all thoughts ! thanks everyone ...take care .......
I'm rooting for birch samples in this one. It's very common, relatively cheaper and has really good characteristics. Seems like a good all purpose wood with high strength.
Probably the best material for all these things,especially the bow,would be Jamaica dogwood.Hard yet springy,not prone to rot,it's always been a favorite for bow making!
Amazing work! Really good science that has created a resource people can use for years. Did you consider rubberwood? That seems to be what all commercial furniture is made from these days.
Just an FYI ... osage is pronounced with a long a as in 'sage advice' ... at least where I I live here in Missouri ... Missouri farmers used these so separate sections of land and fields because they grow very dense, very thorny, and grow intertwined keeping cows in without the need to put of fencing and were very easy to plant. Also, the Osage Orange originated from southern Missouri where Osage Indians used them exclusively for making bows. This is probably TMI but thought what I'd read was interesting and I think it's pretty wood .. so I'd share the information.
BTW I liked the real time footage of you feeding of pieces into the planer : )
Pinned this comment, so maybe people will realize it's been made MANY MANY MANY times before.
@@matthiaswandel lol
@@tseckwr3783 Who are you calling karens? I didn't see anyone being rude about it. Seems like the only rude person here is you.
AKA bois d'arc - wood of the bow.
Are you sure? I'm in Missouri too and we call it hedge apple.
As an hobbyist bowyer you're pretty much spot on for bow woods. Osage orange is generally considered one of the best bow woods. High-quality yew is usually considered the ultimate bow wood, but it's very rare. Elm, dog wood, and ash are pretty popular too.
We also see that in history. The ancient greeks prefered dogwood for spears, javelins and bows, while the vikings prefered ash. Carriages and early cars, where also often made from ash. As was quite a few early aircrafts.
In my neck of the woods persimmon is the close equivalent of osage orange. My uncle told me it was great for hoe & rake handles and for wedges (when splitting rails) because of its toughness.
When we were kida we used to make bows out of Cornelian cherry dogwood localy (Croatia) known as drijen or drijenić, wounder how it would test
Very interesting. Was going to suggest Yew which I believe was the preferred wood for the English long bow.
@@garyknight8616 Yup. And the English longbow evolved from Welsh warbows, and those were made from elm.
Here in Flanders (Belgium), windmill builders always used the wood of Cornus sanguinea (Dogwood) for the spokes of a lantern transmission. So centuries ago, mill builders knew they had to use Cornus in a transmission because of the strength of this type of wood. And they had no "wood strength testing machine". Great video Matthias.
The English longbow was a powerful medieval type of longbow about 2 meters long and was made of yew. Yew wood is missing in your testings.
Oh, they very much had a wood testing machine. It was the application itself. And previous builds with different apparent most suitable types, I'm guessing. There is no kind of testing for the application like the application. :-)
Also, you can get a pretty good idea just bending smaller sections by hand to failure. And one of the main strength differentials in wood is grain. I expect if you go look at those members you will find very straight grained long grain termination woods were chosen. Those guys were not REMOTELY stupid.
Anybody who ever built structures using rain forest woods probably went insane considering just the amount of different species of wood available. :-) Interesting data point, thx.
I've read that Dogwood was traditionally used for wagon wheel hubs due to its abrasion resistance. This might be an idea for future testing. This feature would come into play for things like drawer slides or rockers etc. Another idea might be fastner holding power, as in, the force required to pull a screw or nail. I really like the testing for unusual/ non-commercial species of wood.
Osage orange is also called Bodark / Bois d'arc, which as I understand is French for "bow wood". Historically, Osage people would make bows out of it. It's also has the highest thermal coefficient of any North American wood. It burns so hot it has cracked some stoves.
👍🏻 checks out
Maclura pomifera has been known by a variety of common names in addition to Osage orange, including hedge apple, horse apple, the French bois d'arc and English transliterations: bodark and bodock, also translated as "bow-wood"; monkey ball, monkey brains, yellow-wood and mock orange.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclura_pomifera
Hi Matthias,
I really enjoyed this video, and I love your bend testing machine. I'd like to make one someday for myself. A few points I'd like to bring forward:
A better bend test is a four-point bend test, as this distributes stress evenly along the length of the sample rather than focusing it in one place. The benefit of this is that if there happens to be a slightly weaker point at or near the centre, a 4PBT will accommodate it while a 3PBT will not. Essentially, the 4PBT gives you a true average of the strength acros the whole sample, while a 3PBT tells you the strength right at the centre.
In bowmaking, the value of a species or sample of timber for bowmaking is not its stiffness, nor its mass, but it's allowable working strain. The working strain is the elongation/compression that elicits a given (small) amount of plastic deformation. For example, Yew is an excellent bow wood because it's working strain is around 1.0% (a poor bow wood will have a working strain of about 0.6%).
Interestingly, two bows made of different timbers with similar working strains, but different densities, will have a similar mass... *despite* their density (and almost certainly stiffness) being different.
For those who may be interested, I wrote a series of posts about bend testing timber for making bows here:
ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=5450
And I wrote a bit about how to categorise and rank the merit of species of wood for bowmaking here:
ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=13765
Hello, I went to the traditional bowhunting site and was surprised to find out there are actually formulas when building a wood bow. Very interesting and complex. You probably won't see this question but will ask it anyway. This isn't about which is the best bow wood matter of fact the wood I'm looking for probably would make a lousy bow. What type(s) of wood would you recommend that is very springy and has the greatest bend (10' long and bending almost in half) before it breaks over multiple bendings? Would this wood continue to exhibit these qualities after a period of time and drying? The properties would be more like a living green sapling that resists breaking because of its flexibility. I demonstrate primitive trapping and have little access to small fresh-cut saplings and hope there is a type of wood that will work from year to year. My email is under the about tab when you click the red circle. Thank you.
Sitka spruce. We build airplanes with it. Strong, light, and stable. Douglas fir is also crazy strong, but it's heavier. Our propellers are made from hard maple. Very tough, very strong, buy when it fails, it shatters. Love your testing device!
Sitka spruce is also used for the soundboards in pianos and other instruments due to its excellent acoustic properties.
Yea, the piano industry keeps the aircraft industry stocked with acceptable wood.
Another advantage of Sitka is it is very split resistant when any kind of fastener is used. D-Fir is the opposite.
@@HondoTrailside It is as long as the moisture content of the wood doesn’t get too dry. For example the Sitka spruce used on piano soundboards can form cracks along the quarter-sawn grain when a piano is not stored in a controlled environment that maintains appropriate temperature and humidity levels. Older pianos are even more susceptible to cracked soundboards since the fibers in the wood have naturally degraded with age and don’t have the strength to tolerate wild changes in humidity levels or temperatures. Dust that accumulates on the soundboard has a tendency absorb moisture out of the wood and cause it to dry too fast, causing cracks to form over time. Piano manufacturers tend to quarter saw the Sitka spruce for the soundboards to not only resist the tendency of warping and cracking but to also produce a superior high quality sound output for their instruments.
Sitka Spruce has many uses but making a bow is not one of them. The Modulus of Rupture is too low. Being light in weight is not a top priority for bow woods. You want a low Modulus of Elasticity (springy) with a high Modulus of Rupture (bending strength).
Osage Orange is an amazing wood. Such a neat pre-historic tree. Even better for bows than the legendary English Yew. Grows naturally in such a small area of North America in Texas and Oklahoma and just a tiny part of Arkansas
Not sure your list is complete/correct, I live in Eastern Kansas and we have Osage Orange trees everywhere, including at least 10 in my yard.
Tons of hedgerows in Kansas too.
We had it on our farm in south east Nebraska. Prized as an excellent fence post because they would never rot. Not at all straight though. Makes for a crazy looking fence.
Ohioan checking in, I probably have 30+ Osage oranges in my fence row. It is strange though because if you look up a map of where they grow many do show an area similar to the one described by the original comment.
@@TheBananaPlug He is referring to its original natural range. It has been spread all across the US and parts of Canada but not naturally.
Very interesting. Thanks for this. Grain orientation would affect results considerably as would grain runout over the length of the test piece.
Now, we'd love you to do the same test with riven wood, with force applied with grain vertical and grain horizontal. No rush.
I though the same thing.
I know that yew used to be great wood for bows. I wonder did you have a sample there?
This kind of information is surprisingly hard to find and very useful for woodworkers. Thanks for all the tedious work testing this and sharing the information.
Back in the 90s I did some work for Team Aircraft, and when I visited their factory, that was basically the system they had for testing the spar wood they put in their aircraft kits. Except, they had a frame like yours but contained within it was a bathroom scale and a bottle jack, that simple. I didn't see your earlier video, but I gather you also tried that.
This new machine is incredible.
If you calculate the cross section moment of inertia you can find out the tensile strength. Since all the samples are the same it should be rather easy to include in the spreadsheet
Wood is not an isotropic material: the material strength formulas do not apply.
@@philippeperrin8675 but if you calculate the tensile strength you know the strength in the grain direction, dont you?
@@niske The material strength formulas apply in the elastic range and not at break. Matthias' test is very interesting and impressive to compare woods. However it would be necessary to know the admitted load without the sample remaining deformed once the load has been removed.
Young's modulus or elasticity modulus only applies in the direction parallel to the grain. It is between ice and brick for most woods except bamboo.
It would be bending strength, not pure tensile strength. Although you could argue all the samples failed in tension, it's really not a pure tension test.
Thanks for this test, and for including the spreadsheet on your woodgears site. At some point, if it's possible, I'd like to see how poplar performs.
don't have any.
With @@matthiaswandel poplar isn't popular!
I always really enjoy when a TH-camr's viewers get involved in their projects. It makes the community aspect of this so much more evident.
Wow, That is a LOT of data! Thank you for taking the time to be so complete. I am always impressed with your level of detail. I really enjoyed your mouse trap videos as well as your joinery tests. It has been a pleasure to be a subscriber for all these years. Thank you!
As a structural engineer just getting into woodworking, I really enjoyed this video!
There was quite a section in the Boyer's bible on this topic. This is awesome info for that hobby. I'm betting there are lots of video links getting spread through bow making forums right now. You make some great content Mathias!
In case anyone is interested, it's available for free download at pdfdrive.
One thing missing from your bow analysis, which was very great so thank you, was compression and tensile repetitive stress in wood. From what I’ve read, osage is great in both. Elm is great in tension but the micro-fibers crush and permanently deform in repetitive compression resulting in the springiness and draw weight of the bow to degrade. Interestingly, makers of ancient Holmegaard bows seemed to know this and made design decisions minimizing wood in compression
If Mathias ever decided to make a single bow, I'm betting the whole channel would go Joerg Sprave in no time.
Arrr Heh heheheh
Let me show you its features
Such a fantastic resource you are, Matthias. Thank You.
Just curious, were the samples stored in your shop long enough to have had similar moisture content?
I imagine in the winter there the humidity is quite low.
for two weeks or so. They are small, so they acclimatize faster.
@@matthiaswandel Always a step ahead, way to go man.
I know you are not a "BOW MAKER" but your a "MAKER" and a fine one. You can make awesome. Make a bow Please. Two kinds as noted above. It will get tons if views all of yr subs and all the subs of bow videos. Plus yr skills and input would help alot of folks
Please make a bow. A basic board bow then using ur skills a laminated one would be even better using ur wood data against common woods use for bows.
It would be greatly interesting and would be entertaining and knowledgeable...then test them via.speed , power, ease making and anything else
@@kendion4597 The way Matthias builds everything else, it wouldn't be long before a good bow would be made.
@@kendion4597 Bows are hard from what I'm told! They seem to require a different mindset to most other things. I've no experience personally, but a friend of mine is an archer and I asked her :) She said that most fletchers and other bow-adjacent folks don't make anything else! Bows take a lot of time and dedication and specific knowledge it seems. I doubt he has an interest in gearing his entire operation to making bows for youtube and giving up income from other sources for the time it would take to be "youtube-good-enough".
I'm not sure why, but youtube hasn't been showing your videos in my subscription feed. I'm glad I realized it! Now I have tons to go back and watch!
Great video! I thoroughly enjoyed watching.
Some scientific process, some random guy with an interest in something. So pure
Very interesting as always! Just a quick tip that others have probably mentioned. Osage is pronounced OH-sayj with a soft "g"... the same as sage. It gets its name from the Osage people, a native American tribe of the great plains. They would travel sometimes hundreds of miles to locate this tree for their bows, so your findings align with their experience. Colloquially, I grew up knowing this tree as "horse apple." It's extremely rot-resistant, and is probably the best heating wood in North America.
Yeah, as a European, I paused the video to check Wikipedia for it. In French it's bois d'arc, which is literally wood for bows.
@@Kevin75668 Yes, but just slightly, Apple has 27 million BTUs per cord, while Osage Orange has almost 33 million BTU per cord.
Osage orange is also called hedge in some areas. Burns fantastic but not very fun to cut or split. Throws a ton of sparks too.
Hi, Matthias - We lived in Missouri, outside of St. Louis, a km or less from the Femme Osage river. There were lots of "Osage Orange" trees along the river's path, down past the Daniel Boone homestead to the Missouri River.
Young Osage orange trees can be coppiced, whereas you cut the tree close to the ground and many new shoots will emerge and grow thickly. This can form a fence which is said to be bull strong, horse high and hog tight.
What a fun project!
Two questions:
1) What kinds of podcasts does Matthias listen to in the shop?
2) Would grain density at the test point have an effect on the penetration force result?
Awesome! I'd love to see updates in the future with other really stout woods like live oak and lignum vitae.
It would be interesting to consider moisture content. I would assume that green wood of any variety would be different than dry wood.
I made a bow from Thuja (my neighbours have one side of their property lined with thuja bushes). The wood is insanely good for bows, BUT finding one that isnt twisted or twisted in a way that you can work with it is almost impossible. But i had so many Thujas to chose from so i found some good staves and made two bows out of the ones that stayed straight after seasoning.
I cant stress enough how good hazel is for learning how to make bows. You can find them everywhere, you can work on them when they are still fresh, you can make high quality bows out of seasoned hazel wood if you have the patience, and most importantly they are available in abundance almost everywhere in EU and North America. Hazel is insanely flexible and stores the energy quite well. Only downside is that its not as strong when it comes to compression. This can be worked around with using a suitable limb cross section design though.
Hope my 2 cents help someone
Hello Mr. Wandel, thank you for a great demonstration, and the machine you built to measure the amount of force necessary to break the different species of wood is amazing. I appreciate your wooden gears and being able to measure the forces and plot graphs on your laptop.
I am very happy to see this data collected! I have had a passing interest in the strength to weight measure because of homebuilt aviation. Apparently many wood airplane designs are engineered using softwoods (particularly sitka spruce) because of their "superior strength to weight". However, by playing around with some numbers from the Wood Database, one can easily find that Shagbark Hickory, Black Locust, White Ash and Black Walnut all give excellent strength for their weight despite these first two being among the densest woods in the US. I would love to see you give a broader test comparing more samples of some of these highest strength woods against a broad sample of the common softwoods, especially those used in aviation (spruce, Douglas Fir, Birch). Sitka spruce in particular has become difficult to source and expensive so it could be very helpful for homebuilt/ experimental/ amateur engineers and builders of all walks. Also, I understand that grain orientation and density can create great variability in these tests. Not just grain angle vs force vector, but end grain and ring orientation, ring density (may even be backwards in "ring porous" hardwoods from "diffuse porous" softwoods). so a lot of variability to watch for in your testing. However or whatever you choose to do with you test rig, keep up the good work!
I love seeing these tests, can't wait to see more.
I love the engineering concept on wood! You could make videos on different concepts and usability of woods.
I would love to see you test some of the antipodean timbers from Australia and New Zealand such as Jarrah which is quite incredible and Kauri and heart Rimu and Kahikatea and some Asian ones like Kwila and Teak and Acacia and Gaboon/Merbau etc. This data is awesome. When our boat was built dad tested samples of plywood with a round lead ball dropped from about 1m high with the ply resting on dirt/grass - on all plys except the one we ended up using it went through, off the one we used it bounced. Indeed the hull got a few big hits over the years and always survived with no damage or localised damage that was easy to repair :-)
Spotted gum would be cool
Do it yourself. His system is amazing but it is way overkill, at the aircraft factory i was associated with they just used a welded frame like his, a bathroom scale and a 10 dollar bottle jack. But obviously a wood frame works also.
Also, look up spine tester. Gives you stiffness info which is more relevant anyway. With stuff like spars of boats and planes, and musical instruments, and arrows and bows, or floors, what you want to know is how much can you get out of them without them flexing beyond an accepted tolerance. You don't want them to break so testing them to failure is way past what you want. So for instance joists are sold as 240, 360, and 480. That is the amount they deflect over a given span, under the given load. so over 480 inches that spar would deflect 1 inch while the 240 would deflect one inch over 240 inches under the same load. The point being the deflection is way less that in a test to destruction.
It would be interesting to see a test of Lilac.
I know it’s not seen as “woodworking lumber”, but it’s very hard and can grow to at least 10 cm in diameter, as far as I’ve seen here in southern Sweden.
(I tried to cut one down with an ax, but it was impossible, so I became curious, and now I have saved a few logs for drying.)
send me some
Dry Privet is as hard as woodpecker lips and pretty heavy
The wood is also often quite patterned and pretty.
Similarly, another common Scandinavian garden tree is Laburnum (Gullregn), which has a reputation for being pretty tough, historically being used for fence posts and bows.
@@CrimeVid I second your statement. It turns beautifully on a lathe. I describe the effort as creamy. Have clean hands when handling after turning as it gets dirty instantly. I made some file handles with it.
I would be very curious to see how these turned out as a bow. Something to keep in mind is that many many woods considered sub par can be used when laminated with another wood as well. This has been done historically too, which is nice for the primitive bowmaker types.
Very interesting tests! One additional factor to consider alongside strength when choosing a wood for a project is availability. For example, in the UK and most of Europe, elm is sadly almost non-existant and so not readily available (and what is available is very expensive).
It was interesting to see how well the results matched up - despite only testing a single sample of each - with historical uses of the timbers.
For a non structural engineer, you’re pretty good explaining structural engineer things! Great video (again).
Great experiment, very useful regarding the price of wood. It is certainly wise to look at your chart before buying any wood for a specific project. Thank you much. Merci beaucoup.
I wonder how yew would compare in your test.
This reminds me of how wagon wheels were built with different woods for different parts, springy wood for the spokes, wood that was resistant to splitting for the hubs, and possibly just tough stuff for the fellies, but I'm not so sure what was what
old hubs were american elm =strong cross-link. had to split some as a kid. it didn't split. i had to burn it to get my wedges back.
@@victorhopper6774 Persimmon is good for hubs, doesn't split easily, also used for giant mallets and splitting wedges. Post oak as another wood with spiral grain, I rather pound sand than try to split it.
I’ve been building my own bows over the last couple years. As I was watching this I though, “dang I wonder what bowyers would think of this” and then you talk about bows. That was pretty cool. I only make 3 piece take down bows now and I use fiberglass. But the first bow I made in high school was a hickory board bow. It for sure breaks with a bang. I didn’t have the grain running the right way and it snapped in half on one of the limbs. Cool video, thanks
As a young student studyingmaterial science i found that generally hardwoods ( from a flowering plant/tree) had tesidualt strangth after reaching the yield point snd continued to carry a moderate load even ehen splintering. Softwoods ( eg from conifers, non flowering specias) failed catastrophicly and had little load bearing after splintering. We tested native Eucalypt species, conifers (Pinus sp.) and exotic hardwoods ( Quercis Sp.
The natural lamination of Yew makes a good bow. Osage with purple heart is also a good mix, you can insert a piece of ash in the middle or just ash as a flat bow
will work well.
I heard that English Bowmakers would split the Yew so they had the flexibility of the sapwood and compression of the heartwood. As you say White Knight,, Natural lamination.
That was one of the best videos I've seen in a very long time.
I love the set up more than the test is itself. I just love all the little automations you’ve added haha
Congratulations on your work! Have a wonderful 2022 with great health and success!
Good to see that we made the right choice with ash flooring when it comes to "dent resistance".
Great stuff as always.
I once was told that natives in Canada would make bows using black spruce that slowly grew I’m harsh places. The tight grain would make it suitable for bows.
Related to that, it would be interesting to see how lamination affects strength and flexibility, according to the number of layers.
Cheers.
Excellent video as usual, thank you. I would like to see you testing Paulownia (empress tree). It is a lightweight tree but still it's said to be pretty strong and would be perfect for furnitures if only the surface was harder.
Another important thing for making bows is that the wood has to be able to return to its original state after being bent. That is an important consideration and one of the reasons why osage is so good for bows. It doesn't take much set and it is very strong relative to its admittedly high weight.
This is great work. Hopefully one day someone will get this table and chair thing figured out.
Nice. I did know you are a inventive programmer too. The data gathered is really gold.
Great video, very interesting demonstration! Have you considered doing strength tests based on the way the wood is processed? I have heard that split or riven wood can be stronger than sawn wood. The theory being that splitting the wood preserves longer and more continuous wood fibers verses sawn wood which can sever wood fibers as they intersect the cut. So the more fibers running the full length the stronger the wood, in theory.
That sounds very unlikely to me to have significant impact. At most that would be a surface level difference, which would be effectively negligible. And if you refine the surface in any way (scrape, sand, plane, etc.), that would go away entirely.
Basically, imagine you have two bundles of same length plastic tubes (like those in lollipops), each tied together tightly with inelastic strings. Sample one, you stick a metal ruler in the middle, creating two distinct halves in the bundle. Tie each half up with the same inelastic string, then epoxy each half. Those are your riven or split equivalents. Bundle two, just epoxy everything together from the start, take it to the band saw and cut it in half. That is obviously your sawed wood analog. Sure, you're gonna nick a few tubes there, but how many could you possibly have been nicked to matter? Now imagine the tubes are even smaller in diameter, were all much more irregular, never fully straight or the full length of the original bundle - that is wood in a nutshell.
@@louisvictor3473 Short, interrupted growth rings have a profound negative effect on the woods strength
@@Fogyt121 I didn't mention growth rings, but either way, that is a wood growing problem, not a saw vs splitting problem.
@@louisvictor3473 You are correct, if the cellulose fibers in your lumber are as straight lollipop sticks or soda straws and totally parallel to the face. Unfortunately, more often the cellulose fibers in wood are are very sinuous. You can see that in this video at the 4:01 mark and many other places. For example, the sample at the 1:50 mark shows grain running (curving off the edge) out at almost 45% to the face. When wood is processed by splitting it breaks along the weakest part, the lignin, which binds the cellulose fibers together. Splitting leaves the full length of the cellulose fibers in tact, but a very sinuous and undulating surface which follows the grain. Sawing, on the other hand, severs both the lignin and cellulose fibers intersecting the path of the blade.
As was recently discussed in Patrick Sullivan's end gluing video the lignin bond is much weaker than the cellulose. So maintaining continuous strands of cellulose is much stronger than shorter cellulose lengths that rely on more lignin to hold everything together.
Thanks a lot for your time and efforts and for providing us with the data.
I would be interested in seeing cut resistance and abrasion resistance tests. Also, if you can get your hands on any, live oak (an evergreen oak species from the SW USA) it would ba an interesting wood to test like you did these and for the other tests I mentioned. A fair warning, though: it is very damaging to cutting implements. Anything that isn't carbide tipped it will dull with surprising speed, even hardened tool steels, like the blades for plaining machines and chainsaw teeth. It was used heavily in the wooden shipbuilding industry since it is strong, plentiful, rot resistant, and typically grows curved so it is ideal for ship structures since it requires no bending and less joinery.
I pity those that had to chop them down with hand axes, though, since they had to constantly sharpen their tools and steel saws fair even worse.
Not sure if anyone has commented on it, but breaking strength will not be accurate in sawn wood if the saw doesn't exactly follow the grain of the wood. The best way to test the wood would be to rive (split) our the pieces, so that the grain is never violated. Not sure, but the moisture content of the wood might effect strength as well. Nevertheless, nice test!
I was careful to select pieces that follow the grain. And if you look at how most of them broke, it wasn't because of grain orientation.
Your videos never fail to please. Keep up the Great work!
Cheers from Sweden
Thank you...you amaze me with your skills!!!! I know many others would agree with me.
Pretty interesting testing and results, Matthias! 😃
I wonder if straight grain vs whatever makes much of a difference.
Anyway, happy holidays! And stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Yes grain structure/pattern can make a huge difference
Amazingly interesting! I've got a bunch of dogwood in my garden, but never even considered it to be a productive plant. I have them for esthetics (the smaller branches are bright red in the winter) and because they make for excellent hiding spots for yard birds and bird feeders... It grows so easily once it takes root, so now I'll have to look into changing my cutting plans for this winter. I'll scrub some of the willow and ash and replace them with dogwood now. Funnily, the dogwood bushes are also the favorite place for my dogs to lie in the shade in the summer time!
Matthias, are you measuring motor current (torque) to deduce force? If that is a triangular thread, the friction torque would increase with applied load. An ACME thread or at least greasing it would minimize this potential measurement error.
If you have a load cell in compression that sees the force applied to the wood directly, then ignore the above.
Thanks for sharing. I am looking for some wood for a canoe outrigger boom, that is both strong and flexible. This kind of video is a great help.
As always, good content. It is a great starting point to figure out the properties of different woods, but to make it a more accurate test one would need more than one sample of each wood species, 5 to 10 of each? And to make it a valid test on the species, each sample should come from different trees (of the same species of course), but getting all of those samples would be very hard.
the editing in this video is so good.
Teak wood is worth considering it's regarded as strongest wood for making furniture in India. The best is considered Central Province Teak wood as it has much less moisture in it compared with African varieties.
Purple heart would be interesting too, just to get the two big wood shipmaking lumbers.
Growing up on the farm, I hated fence mending. In particular, I hated repairing wire fences where someone had installed hedge (Osage Orange) posts. These posts were almost always as big around as your thumb, too hard to drive a staple into and also too featureless to securely attach new wire. We usually replaced them instead. They, however, were exceptional firewood - for they had cured in the sun for more than fifty years.
With such a good spring, you could use it to power a rolling cart or your blower/siren.
Fantastic work Matthias! If only you were in Australia and could have a go at putting our local timbers to the test.....whilst not as spectacularly figured as the European and American timbers, I still think they are unbeatable for structural applications.
I'm wondering about the effect of kiln drying on your results. The dark woods may be more likely kiln dried as they were more likely bought from a supplier then home sawn
i agree, age and lack of sample of size are not addressed, but it's still a fascinating experiment nonetheless.
Can we appreciate how good birch is considering how easy and fast it is to grow.
I love all the information you provide in so many of your videos. Thank you very much!
Did you have any Yew wood to test? Yew was traditionally used for longbows in the UK. It also used to be used for furniture because of the flexibility but also in lutes. It's a relatively uncommon wood these days owing to the mature trees tend to be hollow and the wood has plenty of knots. Elm is an interesting wood, heavily affected by Dutch Elm disease but was traditionally used for making boxes and coffins, it's not as strong as Oak but it has a denser interlocked grain which in your test exceeded Oak in the bend test.
Great work. Thanks for sharing the spreadsheet.
Matthias, Just an idea, you could leave the broken samples in the garden and see which rots first and last.
Yeh...then see which compost is the most fertile ...
This test is unique in the internet. I have to make a copy.
In the first moment I thought hainbuche or hornbeem is missed but it will be the yoke elm.
I know it as a very tough wood.
For a hard surface there is a possibility but it is not wood, it is bamboo. It is used for parquet.
Its very easy to listen and relax to an honest voice, this is my night listening and sleep white noise type of asmr.
Since you used a stepper motor, you should be able to do stress/strain curves. Can you publish raw data?
Wouldn't be complete, as the motor lost its position information on the strongest samples.
Depending on shipping and whether I have correctly sized pieces left, I might be able to send you some live oak. From what I've been able to find, it's the third densest wood in the US/Canada behind desert ironwood and mountain mahogany. It was used extensively in ship building, and is an absolute pain to work with, so it might do pretty well
would be fun to test some if you send some. but postage to Canada is more expensive than across the US. email me
I just looked up the numbers, and on average live oak is pretty close to Osage Orange when it comes to density, it would be interesting to see how other characteristics compare.
Osage Orange makes great posts for barbed wire. We more commonly call them hedge posts. With age, they get so tough that it becomes impractical to drive a staple into older posts. It's the toughest wood I've seen.
Matthias, an additional useful measure would be the wood moisture content if you have a way of measuring it.
I was thinking that the lack of moisture content correlation was an extremely critical (i.e. more than just useful) missing factor/variable.
4:53 : the strength vs density plot also has the added bonus of drawing the map of Japan.
For the use as bow wood: How dry were these wood samples and how were they dried? Kiln dried wood is only usable for some species, while a slower drying process makes a lot of wood species more suitable.
A very simplistic and short sighted way to test timber strength and suitability. In practice it's really not that simple.
What you need is a timber that resists shock loads and has toughness combined with flexibility. There are plenty of timbers I know that would test well on this device but would not be best suited to chair making.
But amateur's love reinventing the wheel so now they are reinventing timber. Lol.
Sitting near a dogwood bow stave I've let air dry for years. They tend to take a bit more set than other bow woods, relevant to that last note about it's deformation verses Osage, which takes very little set unless heated.
I’m using locust for an axe handle. I’m interested in the Osage orange as well. Thanks
@matthias we need more of this.
Thanks for making your data available on your website! This will be useful to me for a long time!
Nice tests and excellent work!
It's good to have data like this.. 👍
Great video. I'd love to see similar testing for the species that are usually discarded as junk. Cottonwood, basswood/linden, etc. Maybe they'll prove stronger than people think, or have some characteristic that is useful to hobbyists.
He did include Basswood, came near the bottom IIRC
I don't think anyone considers poplar as junk. Also, it's plenty strong for the purposes it's used for. Same for basswood, softness is its strength.
He had a piece of basswood in there.
@@kryptik0 in fact I was hoping to see poplar on this test.
Basswood is very popular for carving, it is fairly easy to cut, but isn't so soft that it won't keep it's shape.
I suspect that you kept the grain orientation consistent throughout your testing while placing the different wood in the stress testing machine. My question is about which way the grain was oriented when strength testing. Was the board placed in a flat sawn position? (ie: grain horizontal with the table) or in a vertical grain pattern? (ie: the grain perpendicular with the table)
I've no doubt you are well aware that attempting to break a piece of wood is much easier across the flat sawn direction & considerably more difficult against vertical oriented grain. I am very curious as to which way you placed the wood in your strength testing jig. A good example of this is when hafting an axe, the ideal grain orientation for the handle is with the grain running parallel with the axe head When looking at the end of the handle you can clearly see which direction the grain runs. Thanks.
Always learn something new from my favorite Canadian polymath.
Seems like a very tedious way to make kindling, although more interesting than the usual way :)
it would be interesting to know how these would compare to bamboo, osb boards and plastics?
I would think that straight grain would be an important factor in a bow. I thought that is why Hickory was used. I guess you would need to split the logs into billets for testing, but that might not allow for reducing variables between species.
Straight grain does matter if the bow doesn’t have any backing. I made a bow out of a hickory board when I was in high school, the grain wasn’t perfectly straight and it snapped when I was trying to see how it bent on the floor. Clay Hayes has some really good videos on building self bows, if you wanted to watch something like that. Not really sure what the protocol is, I don’t comment much on TH-cam.
Load/deflection at failure will change based on moisture content. Often there is a plateau in values when they become 'fully saturated'.
Love your work ! Question ...might i make a 12'' riser block for my delta band saw , by laminating hickory flooring or planks ? im open to all thoughts ! thanks everyone ...take care .......
Where I live they usually make bows using hazelnut branch. These are not professional bows, though, only casual stuff mainly for kids to play with.
I'm rooting for birch samples in this one. It's very common, relatively cheaper and has really good characteristics. Seems like a good all purpose wood with high strength.
Me too, its the best naturally growing hardwood in my part of Canada.
Probably the best material for all these things,especially the bow,would be Jamaica dogwood.Hard yet springy,not prone to rot,it's always been a favorite for bow making!
Amazing work! Really good science that has created a resource people can use for years. Did you consider rubberwood? That seems to be what all commercial furniture is made from these days.