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it is interesting what you discover about alternate woods.
The alternate wood I'm using has been australian queensland hoop pine. I found the batch I had a bit brash (a timber term meaning brittle short grained wood) so I was on the lookout for something a little safer for use in my Turbulent. well for the structural bits anyway. Australia's equivalent of Home Depot is Bunnings hardware. The stores are layed out as an exact clone of the american stores, but that is bye the bye. What I discovered in Bunnings one day was some extremely knotted planks of some yellowish wood. between the bazillion (a huge number) of knots was some amazingly fine grained timber. about 0ne ring per millimeter. the wood felt quite reasonable for weight so I bought a plank to experiment with. At this stage I had no idea what the wood species was. the stuff had a weedy smell when cut. it steamed easily and seemed to glue with epoxy really well. I used the straight grained pieces for the turtledeck bows of my first Turbulent fuselage. I experiemented some more with the remaining wood and couldnt fault it as a construction timber. I had a brainwave one day and hunted out the receipt off the floor of the car. alaskan yellow cedar was what the receipt called it. I had visions of weedy little trees in wind swept tundra being raped over by alaskan timber harvesters :-) I discussed the need to test the wood to determin its strength with an aero engineer friend. the next night he sent me the full design strength specs for the wood. having never heard of it before, this stunned me. I did some google searching and discovered some truely interesting facts regarding alaskan yellow cedar. the weedy smell only occurs when the wood has a high moisture content. when the wood is down at moisture contents suitable for aircraft use the wood is odourless. what a useful property an indicator of useful moisture content is. Trees have been discovered in forests that have no insect or microrganism attack even after standing as dead trunks for 150 years. It turns out that alaskan yellow cedar is rated as the softwood most inherently resistant to attack by bugs. another really useful property. I discovered an early aeroengineering text that gave comparitive rundowns of alternative woods to the ubiquitous Spruce. Alaskan yellow Cedar is rated as a highly shock absorbent/resistant wood sutiable for the most arduous structural use, which is the very opposite of brash timber. the thing that floored me though was the reason why spruce was selected as the wood of choice, it wasnt spruce's properties, it was just that there appeared to me more millable timber available. Alaskan yellow cedar, far from being a lower grade alternative wood to spruce, is actually a better timber in a number of it's properties. I was amazed. an alternative timber selected on a hunch turned out to be a winner. My second attempt D3 Turbulent is shaping up to be a pearler of an aircraft in Alaskan Yellow Cedar and Qld Hoop Pine marine ply. Dont knock some of those alternative timbers. Some mean that the drying up of spruce is an artifact of history, not the end of timber aircraft. ....which is good 'cause timber aircraft are wonderful building experiences. Stealth (not a single nail used in construction) Pilot btw my rape picture turned out to be a vivid imagination. there are huge stands of majestic alaskan yellow cedar all down the southern coast. there are a lot of aircraft in those trees. |
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