ALL ABOUT TIMBER
Mihilaka Forestry Service provides many service on forestry and timber sector and this web site (timber.lk) educates our readers mainly on “all about timber”. Timber is one of the oldest building material used by man and also timber is a least known material among other uses because there are more than 20000 timber species in the world and each species has unique wood properties. If the best and most economical use of wood is to be made, all the properties of the material require to be studied carefully, and used in the most appropriate manner. We hope by reading this pages you will achieve above objectives.
Structure of wood
Wood is a heterogeneous, hygroscopic, cellular and anisotropic material. It is composed of cells, and the cell walls are composed of micro-fibrils of cellulose (40% -50%) and hemicelluloses (15-25%) impregnated with lignin (15-30%). In coniferous, the material is much more uniform than most hardwoods .
Seasoning
The primary aim in seasoning is to render timber as stable as possible, thereby ensuring that once it is made up into furniture etc., movement will be negligible or for practical purposes non-existent.The whole art of successful seasoning lies in maintaining a balance between the evaporation of water from the surface of timber and the movement of water from the interior of the wood to the surface
Timber vedio
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Preparing of timber section for timber identification
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Timber identification
Reliable identification of wood can be carried out by examination of its microscopic structural features and comparing the presence/absence, size, shape distribution and frequency of the various features with those of a known standard.
Preservation
All measures that are taken to ensure a long life of wood fall under the definition wood preservation (timber treatment).
gross feature
Gross feature such as colour, sapwood, heartwood, and growth ring , which are readily seen with the naked eye, and enable the quality of wood to be assessed.