Treesearch

Consumers can easily be confused by the abundance of choices to make when selecting a clear wood finish. There are many types of clear finishes with different characteristics and product claims. This article is designed to help consumers sort out the different finishes and effectively choose which product would be best for their purpose. First, we cover the causes and mechanism of wood degradation. It is important to know what we are protecting wood from rand why. Then we describe in detail the different kinds of clear wood finishes and how they are designed to work. We also cover the...

Manufacturers and installers of wood-veneered furniture and cabinetry sometimes find that their products eventually develop surface distortions, characterized by either buckling or cracking of the surface finish. The veneer itself sometimes buckles or cracks. Most surface distortions are caused by moisture changes in the product. This guide is a diagnostic tool for locating or narrowing down the source of the problem. By describing the many ways in which moisture changes can become a problem, the guide provides information for avoiding or minimizing surface distortions. Although the guide...

Micrandra inundata is a distinctive new species adapted to seasonally flooded black-water river banks in southern Venezuela. Trees rarely exceed 10 m in height but have thick basal trunks composed of very lightweight wood. It has the smallest leaves and fruits of any known Micrandra species and appears to be most closely related to M. minor Benth. The botanical description is accompanied by habit photographs, line illustrations of morphological features, and photomicrographs and detailed descriptions of the wood anatomy.

In this study, the applicability of a multiple regression equation for estimating air drying times of red oak, sugar maple, and ponderosa pine lumber was evaluated. The equation allows prediction of estimated air drying times from historic weather records of temperature and relative humidity at any desired location.

The chemical composition of a variety of agricultural biomass samples was analyzed with near infrared spectroscopy and pyrolysis molecular beam mass spectroscopy. These samples were selected from a wide array of agricultural residue samples and included residues that had been subjected to a variety of di2erent treatments including solvent extractions and chemical modifications. This analysis showed that both spectroscopic tools, coupled with multivariate analytical techniques, could be used to differentiate the samples and accurately predict the chemical composition of this disparate set...

In economics, primary inputs or factors of production define the term ‘resources.’ Resources include land resources (plants, animals, and minerals), labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Almost all pulp and paper fiber resources are plant materials obtained from trees or agricultural crops. These resources encompass plant materials harvested directly from the land (wood, straw, bamboo, etc.), plant material byproducts or residuals from other manufacturing processes (wood chips from sawmills, bagasse fiber from sugarcane processing, cotton linter, etc.), and fibers recovered from recycled...

Wood is a hygroscopic resource that was designed to perform, in nature, in a wet environment. Nature is programmed to recycle wood in a timely way through biological, thermal, aqueous, photochemical, chemical, and mechanical degradations. In simple terms, nature builds wood from carbon dioxide and water and has all the tools to recycle it back to the starting chemicals. We harvest a green tree and convert it into dry products, and nature. with its arsenal of degrading reactions, starts to reclaim it at its first opportunity. The properties of any resource are, in general, a result of the...

The abrupt millennial-scale changes associated with the Younger Dryas (YD) event (“chronozone”) near the dawn of the Holocene are at least hemispheric, if not global, in extent. Evidence for the YD cold excursion is abundant in Europe but fairly meager in central North America. We are engaged in an investigation of high-resolution environmental changes in mid-North America over several millennia (about 10,000 to 14,000 BP) during the Late Glacial-Early Holocene transition, including the YD interval. Several sites containing logs or stumps have been identified and we are in the process of...

Soy-based glues were very popular early in the 20th century. These adhesives were low cost and allowed for excellent performance in plywood panels as long as they were kept dry. These adhesives were quickly supplanted by lower cost, better performing petroleum-based resins in the middle half of the century. With the recent increase in the price of petroleum, soy-based resins may again be considered attractive alternatives if some of their previous performance limitations can be overcome. This paper provides a detailed look into a new soy-based adhesive system that offers board manufacturers...

Polyoxometalates (POMs), of which alpha-Keggin anions are representative, are a diverse and rapidly growing class of water-soluble cluster-anion structures with applications ranging from molecular catalysis to materials. [1] POMs are inexpensive, minimally or non-toxic, negatively charged clusters comprised of early transition-metals, usually in their do electronic configurations (e.g. W(VI), Mo(VI), V(V), Nb(V), Ti(IV)), bridged by oxygens (formally oxide, or occasionally hydroxide ions). POMs have a number of attributes that render them attractive for applications in catalysis[2] and...