What is the connection between the 'Little Ice Age' that began in the 15th century and Stradivari and Guarneri violins? The answer is a tree.
What industry once employed 10,000 men and provided New Zealand with its most important export for over 50 years? The answer is not gold, wool or mutton. Nor is it wood, though it is a product of Kauri trees.
Why do beeches have smooth barks and other tree's barks are heavily fissured? Also, why does sheltering under a beech in a storm not provide protection against lightening?
Is the deadly Upas tree really all that deadly?
Jonathan Drori provides vignettes on 80 trees from around the world. I enjoyed every one. I hope there will be a 'Around the World in 80 more trees'.
Link
Showing posts with label wood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wood. Show all posts
Unique chess set made using fourteen different woods
This chess set has been made using fourteen different woods; including mahogany, walnut, flamey birch, spalted hornbeam, zebrawood and douglas fir.
The board is made of 1cm thick pieces of mahogany and sycamore, with a plywood substrate. Rows one and eight are raised up 2cm. Rows two and seven are raised 1cm. The case is made of flamey birch and has been treated with diluted tung oil to bring out the figuring.
The 'dark' pieces have been made using six different woods.
Rook - douglas fir treated with diluted tung oil.
Knight - zebrano [aka zebrawood].
Bishop - walnut.
King and Queen - oak treated with diluted tung oil.
Pawns - body is ebony, head is dyed beech.
The pieces have been designed according to their direction of travel. A rook can move forwards, backward or side to side. A knight can move one square forwards, backward or side to side plus one square diagonally. A bishop can move diagonally.
The king and queen can move in any direction. Their direction of travel has been indicated by their bases, rather than by the shape of the piece.
The 'light' pieces have also been made using six different woods.
Rook - maple.
Knight - lime.
Bishop - cherry
King and Queen - spalted hornbeam.
Pawns - body is ash, head is beech.
The 'dark' pieces have been made using six different woods.
Rook - douglas fir treated with diluted tung oil.
Knight - zebrano [aka zebrawood].
Bishop - walnut.
King and Queen - oak treated with diluted tung oil.
Pawns - body is ebony, head is dyed beech.
The pieces have been designed according to their direction of travel. A rook can move forwards, backward or side to side. A knight can move one square forwards, backward or side to side plus one square diagonally. A bishop can move diagonally.
The king and queen can move in any direction. Their direction of travel has been indicated by their bases, rather than by the shape of the piece.
The 'light' pieces have also been made using six different woods.
Rook - maple.
Knight - lime.
Bishop - cherry
King and Queen - spalted hornbeam.
Pawns - body is ash, head is beech.
Tallwood
On a recent visit to Vancouver I went out to the University of British Columbia [UBC] campus. There is much of interest on the campus, including the Museum of Anthropology, the Nitobe Gardens and the Museum of Biodiversity. See my posts on the first two of these.
This post is about a recently added attraction. The Tallwood student residence. This building is the tallest wooden building in the world with 17 stories and accommodation for 400 students. Instead of using reinforced concrete most of the building is constructed using cross laminated timber [CLT].
CLT is like grown up plywood. It consists of strips of timber glued together to whatever thickness and shape is required. CLT is very strong and rot and fire resistant. Accommodation units were factory built off site and then just slotted into the building.
This video provides a time lapse of the buildings construction.
Using CLT speeds construction and is environmentally superior to concrete. Instead of using a lot of energy to produce cement the CLT building method locks up CO2 for the life of a building.
Canada has a lot of trees and is well equipped to lead in the construction of buildings like Tallwood. The amount of timber used in the construction was replaced in 6 minutes by the normal growth of Canada's forests.
A lot of Canada's cities have housing shortages. The situation in Vancouver is particularly bad. Some government contracts to build a lot of apartment blocks would be a way of developing the country's CLT production and construction industries.
New Zealand is another country with a lot of trees but not enough houses. I wonder if it is looking a CLT construction.
Visiting UBC
There are frequent buses from downtown Vancouver. It is a very attractive campus but also a large one. The Museum of Anthropology [shown as MOA on campus maps] and the Nitobe Gardens are close together on the edge of the campus. Tallwood and the Museum of Biodiversity more central and are fairly close together.
This post is about a recently added attraction. The Tallwood student residence. This building is the tallest wooden building in the world with 17 stories and accommodation for 400 students. Instead of using reinforced concrete most of the building is constructed using cross laminated timber [CLT].
CLT is like grown up plywood. It consists of strips of timber glued together to whatever thickness and shape is required. CLT is very strong and rot and fire resistant. Accommodation units were factory built off site and then just slotted into the building.
This video provides a time lapse of the buildings construction.
Using CLT speeds construction and is environmentally superior to concrete. Instead of using a lot of energy to produce cement the CLT building method locks up CO2 for the life of a building.
Canada has a lot of trees and is well equipped to lead in the construction of buildings like Tallwood. The amount of timber used in the construction was replaced in 6 minutes by the normal growth of Canada's forests.
A lot of Canada's cities have housing shortages. The situation in Vancouver is particularly bad. Some government contracts to build a lot of apartment blocks would be a way of developing the country's CLT production and construction industries.
New Zealand is another country with a lot of trees but not enough houses. I wonder if it is looking a CLT construction.
Visiting UBC
There are frequent buses from downtown Vancouver. It is a very attractive campus but also a large one. The Museum of Anthropology [shown as MOA on campus maps] and the Nitobe Gardens are close together on the edge of the campus. Tallwood and the Museum of Biodiversity more central and are fairly close together.
Unhappy Woods
The above box is 150mm square and 65mm high. It is made out of beech, a very common English wood. The wood has not been treated in any way. What you see is just the natural wood.
After the tree died it became infected with fungi which produced the attractive figuring you can see above. Such figured beech is also known as spalted beech. Decades ago wood merchants could only sell such wood as firewood. Now it is in such demand that cut logs are left in the weeds after been felled in the hope that they wood will become infected and produce spalting. The process takes 2 to 3 years to reach the ideal stage.
The black lines are created by different
species of fungi erecting barriers around their territory! There are
primary colonizers who come first and establish territories and then
have to defend them against secondary colonizers who are only able to
colonize the wood because the primary colonizers have changed the ph of
the wood & its structure. If left unchecked
eventually the whole tree is consumed by the fungi, part of nature’s way of dealing with dead trees.
I only had a small piece of this wood and the lid had to be made by glueing three very thin pieces together. The rectangular reinforcing bars shown loose on the top of the box will be glued to the underside of the lid.
Unhappy Woods
There are many different types of figuring and many different woods that can become figured.
I refer to figured woods as unhappy woods because their attractive figuring is caused by infections [virus or fungi], beetle infestations [ambrosia figuring is caused by fungi entering a tree through the bore holes created by the ambrosia beetle], physical damage [burrs/burls] and stress [the birdseye figuring sometimes found in maple is believed to be produced when a tree has to compete for sunlight with surrounding trees but is growing in poor soil].
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| Birdseye |
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