Wood

consistency can be a very good reason.

on the other hand, if you using engineered wood laminates,..... well the costs are in the glue, set-up and weight.

The Avenger Class Minesweepers are made almost entirely out of wood and wood laminates........... so wood and wood laminates still has some very desirable qualities.

A minesweeper is a good example of wood being used, but most people will look at a minesweeper and not realize it is made of wood. The Spruce Goose flew, but HH didn't have engines powerful enough for the job. I wonder if that plane were re-fitted with the more powerful engines of today, how would it perform?

I recall HH saying (Unofficially, but I don't recall the reference) that he would never do that again, the way it creaked...

As far as the minesweepers,

Before I was hired at PBI, when I interviewed there, they had one that was at the dockside naked and ready for paint, it was impressive, reminded me of Noah's ark with the wood showing. I was impressed.

If the SG were fitted with more powerful engines it might make it all the way to the scene of the crash.

Hughes never got it out of ground effect flight, so, we'll never know.

Let's not ignore the Yankee Clipper Ships and their significance to navigation.

Years ago I wrote a movie script hoping to possibly build a replica of McKay's Bald Eagle!

Hey,, whatever floats yer boat....

How about a wooden supercar ?

"The entire car, which is made from a combination of maple, plywood and MDF, weighs just 1,134kg - some 240kg less than the super lightweight Porsche.

The eco-friendly two seater, which is fitted with a six-speed, manual gearbox, can sprint from 0 to 60mph in just over three seconds.

But despite its awesome power, designers say the stylish petrol driven car will still be able to do up to 20mpg."

"The 15ft-long car has a laminated wood veneer chassis and wooden wheel rims inside giant 20 inch diameter tyres.

Suspension is provided through laminated wooden arms and springs made from orange wood.

Joe, from North Carolina, US, added: "The light weight is achieved through careful design and composite construction.

"The Splinter is not made from any carved-out, solid chunks of wood, but rather moulded laminates."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-516687/The-worlds-wooden-supercar-faster-Porsche-Lamborghini.html#ixzz2PwRWCvd7

Talk about crash and burn!!!

Break out the marshmallows and weenies!

Your information is out of date.(the "Spruce Goose". It is still in a storage hanger)

In 1980, the Hercules was acquired by the Aero Club of Southern California, which put the aircraft on display in a large dome adjacent to the Queen Mary exhibit in Long Beach, California. In 1988, The Walt Disney Company acquired both attractions and the associated real estate. Disney informed the Aero Club of Southern California that it no longer wished to display the Hercules after its highly ambitious Port Disney was scrapped. After a long search for a suitable host, the Aero Club of Southern California sold the Hughes flying boat to Evergreen Aviation Museum. Under the direction of museum staff, the aircraft was disassembled and moved by barge and truck to its current home in McMinnville, Oregon (about 40 miles (60 km) southwest of Portland), where it has been on display ever since. The Flying Boat arrived in McMinnville on February 27, 1993 after a 138-day, 1,055-mile (1,698 km) trip from Long Beach.

I was referring to the McMinnville museum as the storage hanger.

It's because people want cheap and have no taste...
Del

Not all people.

This picture doesn't do the piece justice. None of the wood has been stained, it's all natural, and all WOOD.

This is a local artist. That's one piece of wood - 7 foot wingspan!

That's a beautiful piece. Southeast Alaska artist Doug Hudson does a similar technique featuring marine animals. I have a Greg Frye Weaver six-layer jigsaw puzzle in walnut, tulipwood, teak, rosewood, maple, and luan (depicting sky, sun, and four mountain ranges).

Wood is indespensible for many musical instruments, too. Wonderful natural tones, both in sounds and colors.

Back when I got out of high school and went to a tech college one of my tech professors had a pretty good story about the use of wood.

Apparently he and his brother inlaw or brother (Some family member anyway) bought what was supposedly a good used diesel engine to fix one of their farm tractors or the like. It compression tested good before they bought it and brought it home. A good day work later they had it in and went to start it up and by gosh they got a good solid engine they thought.

Well it was a good solid runner for about a minute or better before the wooden pistons caught fire and started burning inside the engine! He said it started to rev up and smell like burning wood then dropped off and stalled as the compression went down and flaming bits of wood and sparks came out the exhaust!

Thats right. Somebody went to the efforts of lathing out perfect copies of the original engines pistons out of hardwood and installed them.

He said he used to have what was left of one of the wood pistons on display in one of the tech labs for a few years until a custodian unwittingly tossed it out one summer.

...then there's the old one about the wooden car with wooden wheels and wooden seats and wooden engine...

...that wooden go...

I love wood! Modern sports cars have been made of wood. The British Marcos was a great performer. Mostly made of plywood:

I wonder if they still make the Morgan - with the ash frame?

Morgan is still going strong, introducing new models & still using ash frames.

I've heard the sound of metal resonator acoustic guitars and wood acoustic guitars and still prefer the sound of the wood. There is nothing like that sound and it cannot be recreated with metal.

Kaman did a pretty good business with composite Ovation guitars.

I even have a cheapy Applause Guitar that has an aluminum neck (the frets are Ni plated "for durability") in addition to the composite back and Spruce top. It's plenty of axe for me. :)

Because if everything was made of wood, the rainforest would be a distant memory? I do not mind if thinks are made of wood, as long as it is renewable wood.

Well the company where I work, we make food ingredients out of wood., such as liquid smoke, as well as Vanillin... (artificial vanilla), All from sawdust.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanillin

.....do you make Wonderbread too??

If we did, that really would be 'Wonder" bread.

Termites love that!

In responding to why metals and plastics over wood, my bet would be on economics and weight. Metal parts are readily stamped out of light gauge metal in mass, with ribs and stiffeners as appropriate for strength, and plastic parts/components economically manufactured by injection molding. Both offer cost and weight savings, which seems to be increasingly important in weight reduction in the auto industry for fuel economy standards.

In today's manufacturing/fabrication market, labor cost dictate material selection in producing a product which is acceptable to the buying public as well as produced and sold at a profit. (I can't remember seeing ANY wood products imported from China.Then again, they may lack the natural resources~~trees)

Personally, I always loved the richness of burled walnut insets on the interiors of sports and expensive touring cars. (although they too may now be plastic)

Also, exquisite wood working required true artisans, who breathed life into their work, which most of the world of today doesn't seem wanting of or willing to pay the price for. (Jay Leno could be the exception, but I don't think money is an issue for him!!)

Wood of course is one of the best& renewable construction material, bio degradable.

With ongoing escalation of materials demand it is fact wood is very much replaced by plastics like FRP, Hylum, PVC etc, just for the reason of availability, cheapness & material sustainability. One way it is a good sign that, it helps to phase down deforestation.

With the ongoing level of deforestation, wood will become a rare commodity for humans, Thanks to nature that, it renews & refresh forest wealth some how.

Construction of course is a positive use & think of burning of fire wood for boilers & heat just because it costs less than Gas. fuels. Future sustainability has become such an uncertain phenomenon & who will bell this CAT of wood resources abuse?.

In future needs more actions & implementations on refreshing our wood resources & combine it effectively with plastics in a sustainable manner.

At least most fire woods are dried and probably near dying becoming deadfalls- these are great fuels and fully renewable

The fate here in Indian Industries is that almost all companies have turned up into firewood boilers in stead of coal, Gas, fuels for cost factor. almost 15 to 20000 tonnes of firewood is consumed by the textile sector alone

A tree takes nearly 10 to 15 years to go for matured growth & we could burn it just few hours /; Minutes. Total imbalance between growth rate & consumption rates

Wood when converted into non combustible building material, the construction industry will become sustainable.

Just think about TERMITES.......

I'm just in the process to evict them from my house.

The house is made structurally with a steel frame, only a few bits are made from wood.... Yet they've found a way inside......

Plastic has it's place. It's cheap, and consistent in it's properties. But what is has in ease of manufacture, it also looses in aesthetics. Like this little plastic clock,

It's cheap, but it's nothing like the original in wood,

http://www.idle-tyme.com

The first reason that comes to mind is material consistency. A mill run batch of wood contains some stable and desirable material that is usable for making products, but there is also knots, checks, wormholes, pitch pockets, mineral stain and a variety of densities. This can vary from batch to batch, tree to tree, trees grown in different regions and in different years.

Compare this to metals and plastics which are highly consistent in physical properties, making engineering products out of wood a nightmare. The structural and aesthetic properties of wood are very inconsistent without intense grading, separating, color-sorting, drying, defecting, re sawing and laminating.

Labor is another prominent reason. First, a crew needs to go the woods and cut the trees and transport all of the raw material to the saw mill. Here the logs are de-barked, and a good sawyer rip-cuts the log to achieve best yield and value. Then the lumber is sorted, graded and sent to the kiln dryer.

Graded packs of lumber are then sent to a 'Rough Mill'. Here the lumber is re-graded, planed to a uniform thickness, rip-cut for yield, cross-cut for yield, grain and color matched, glued up and re-planed.

Now the material is in blank form and ready for final machining by a craftsman or cnc machine, then sanded and assembled. Usually the product has to have a finish applied to keep it stable.

Most of these processes have automation involved but the human element of judgement is required in nearly every step of every process to manage the inconsistencies of the material. Automation is involved mostly in material handling and machine control.

For me, wood has become the "purists" material because a well made wooden product always reflects the craftsmanship and labor-intense human involvement.

Before my old '85 GMC finally bit the dust as a logging truck, I had a wood framed crane bolted to the bed. Used it with a 2 ton winch and it worked great. Still have it sitting behind the shed.

The mosquito bomber was much more difficult to build than similar aircraft of the time...it used a special plywood made from Canadian Birch and Equadorian Balsa wood. They went to all this trouble because Lord Beaverbrook would not allow aluminum to be diverted from the other aircraft being built at the time, particularly the Spitfire fighter aircraft. (Seems the Battle of Britain was more important than Bomber Harriss's plans for revenge.)

The time, money and energy that went into the mosquito would NEVER have been done except for the political manipulation of commodities. The use of plywood did not actually make a "better" aircraft, just one that didn't need as much scarce war material.

I always wanted to see the torpedo proof ships made from sawdust and ice...that that would have been a "better" design, in EVERY respect, but of course, by the time that was being done, the Yanks were spitting out a ship a day in Newport News, (3 a day nation wide!) and the loss of thousands of sailors was a cheap enough price to pay to get the US into the war and kick start the US economy with the mega production that war time brings.

The window of opportunity closed with the summer of 1943, and Geoff Pyke (the scientist who was tasked with developing bomb proof ice-wood pulp material) was re-assigned to create snow-mobiles for a combined Canadian-American task force which was actually never used for its intended purpose. The Devil's Brigade left their plaque on a wall in Rome later on though. Presumably, he was going to make snow mobiles out of wood, but we'll never know. I imagine he was happier in sunny Italy than on the Murmansk run in any case.

A friend of mine, a "woodworker" uses a lot of engineered woods. Plywood, oriented strand board, particle board. He tells me that he loves everything about woodworking except working with wood. Nasty, splintery stuff which swells, shrinks, cracks, pops nails and in general, cannot be relied upon to never need a call back. His plywood cabinetry is lighter, stronger, faster to make, and it doesn't break. He uses a material for deck building which is a re-cyled thermo plastic with about 80% sawdust. I dunno...seems unfair to call these 2 by 4's "wood". I mean, sawdust just happened to be what they had lying around, you could have used wool, or rice crispies or chopped garbage. Outdoor furniture made from this stuff seems to last a VERY long time though. Way longer than wood.

Concrete makes better, longer lasting telephone poles, and the dog can pee on a ceramic tile floor and not ruin it. Does wood have a place in modern production? Well....how many ships are made from wood these days? Skyscrapers? No? I bet there is are reason why....

Wood makes pretty jig saw puzzles and handsome wall coverings. They make pretty floor coverings as long as you cover them with urethane plastic. Steel studs are the norm in commercial construction, so even the traditional use of softwood as a building material is going the way of the Dodo. Even wood as fuel is being superceeded by pelletized material. I have a beer mug made from wood...it is developing a crack, and I think ceramic is a better material.

So wood by itself pretty much sucks as a building material. You have to engineer it to death to make it useful. What bridge has been made from wood lately?

Let's give wood bridges some credit.

Trajan's Bridge over the Danube, built by Apollodorus from Damascus, in 103 AD, was the longest segmental bridge for a total length of 1079.5 m., remained the longest bridge to have ever been built for over 1000 years.

Caesar's Bridge over the Rhine was built in 10 days using local lumber during the Gallic Wars in 55 BC. After the Roman forces crossed the Rhine for a few days without fighting, they turned back and dismantled the bridge.

Vince...I said "lately"!

All the great train trestels are being replaced. Maybe they should hire Appolodorus to replace them with wood instead of steel.

Oh wait, I don't think he is practicing at the moment...

Grin!

Yousef1...That is why I reported Trajan before Caesar!

BTW Apollodorus got into concrete with the Pantheon...

ahhhhh.... beat me to it.....

GA, I'm surprised this didn't get some more.

One thing I noted re the construction of wooden Vessels during the world war two- that has been overloked-most of the Corvettes and Mnesweepers were wooden as the metal hulls attacted both the magnetic mines and torpedoes and the wooden ships did not do this- a short haul in the Canadian Navy in 1944-45 taught me this

Don't forget the Calfee bamboo bicycle.

All kinds of transportation and stuff.

How about this Gentleman and his dedication to precision?

http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/61/1/53.full

BTW, tone wood is called that for a good reason.

This one is not wood, rather it is glass...but likewise you have to admire this mans dedication to precision!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73txXT21aZU&safe=active

That's very nice. No seals or rings, just good fit.

I thoroughly enjoyed his biography. It was on the (US Navy) CNO's reading list at the time.

I read an artical a while about back about building wind towers made from wooden construction....it was a good article to, but I dont know where it is. Im at work, so 'google' time is limited, but found this:

http://www.timbertower.de/en/product/advantages/

Might be worth researching further if it was of interest to you.

And who doesn't like morning wood?

Tell me what that's like again.

I would hazard a guess and say wood is 100% usable. Besides its obvious uses, that which is waste is being used. The bark is used as mulch, sawdust is used for charcoal briquettes and fiberboard, scraps are used to feed co-generation plants. Every bit of a tree can be used with a minimum amount of processing, unlike matals which have to be refined from ore, melted, rolled and shaped before it is useful. Wood as an engineering material has been around for a long time. I'm sure there are still applications where it could compete equally with metals.

I live in a small town in the Midwest USA. Several ago there was a problem with a water line in theld southern part of town. When the line was un-earthed it was found that the pipes were wood. They were intact and still holding. It was determined that they were 110 years old! Pretty impressive. I had an 8" long piece that was cut out of the line. I had been saving it for posterity, but decided to give it to a contractor friend of mine.

There are logs that have been lying on the bottom of the Great Lakes and other fresh water lakes and rivers for well over 100 years and when retrieved, are perfectly usable. In fact, most of it is old growth timber and prized by furniture and home builders.

Yah, I recall sitting at the kitchen table when I was about 8 years old, listening to the old-timers talk about it. WARNING MORBID thoughts of an 8 year old.

And what stuck in my mind was the description of it happening when it broke through the ice..

Along with the logs at the bottom of the lakes are teams of horses that was pulling the logs still hooked on the skid. (Lack of oxygen at those depths)

As a 8 year old I pictured from the stories the skid breaking through the ice. The teamster could not unhook because the tugs to release the team were pulled tight with the team of horses pulling for their lives, steam blowing from their noses as they struggle for freedom as they get pulled under......... And the teamsters with a team, long cold and lonely walk home.

Life is one obstacle after another.

Could be...

But more likely the wood was from log booms. Fresh timber will sometimes sink. The Ottawa river bottom "was" covered in these logs, but most have been salvaged in the last 20 years or so. Lumber cut from these softwood logs has few knots and is a beautiful deep yellow, almost orange colour. It takes about two years of the gentlest kiln cure available to dry them out so they won't split, and the cost is about three times the cost of newer timber.

We tend to send that stuff to the States for high end furniture applications, and in turn we get sunken "swamp" cypress from Florida and Alabama. It arrives wrapped in burlap, still dripping, ready to be placed into these container-kilns up here. Sunken swamp cypress is purple, gold and stripey black, and is VERY valuable once it is processed.

That link is really worth going to.

Take a few moments and dream...

But more likely the wood was from log booms.

It was, but it was logged from private individuals making ends meet financially taking it from Wisconsin's peninsula across the Bay of Green Bay to Marinette, Wisconsin.

Having helped my dad in the woods with horses in a cold day, nostrils flared with steam rolling out. That what I pictured when they told this story.

Yes , it is true that this type of woods are being used for furniture .

One more thing about wood. Steel framed buildings will collapse in a fire while wood will withstand collapse longer and will survive as long as the firefighters can get to it in time.

Yusef1; Well....how many ships are made from wood these days?

Not many and for a good reason. It requires skills that are long to acquire, unlike welding and fiberglass.