Very old tone wood

[rocket]

Picked up a piece of Huon Pine yesterday thanks to Bob, i took some pics of an off cut from the billet and going by the growth rings on it the 85 mm piece took about 225 years to grow so,,,, if the tree was about one meter in diameter that makes it about 1240 years old when it died,, Wow!!! hard to tell but it was probably much older than that!!

closeup of annulars, black marks are 10mm apart

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70 to 90 mm shows the sapwood and bark.

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Cheers

Rod.

[routout]

Pretty awesome stuff I tried counting one and gave up I had access to a stereo microscope where I worked I think you guessed rite I also had some old spruce from a pedal organ and it was 1870 according to the news paper used when gluing it together .Here is the trick I had some relativity new spruce say 20 years old and under the microscope you could see the sap wood had deteriorated more in the old so long story short the wood structure was lighter ,more tone ?who knows .

[Nick]

Wow! Don't think I've ever seen a piece of timber with that tight a growth ring pattern. More rings per inch than a Proctologist's clinic!

[kiwigeo]

More rings per inch than a Proctologist's clinic!

[Steve.Toscano]

Here's a piece of my King Billy brace material.

Hard to count, but from the right side of this photo is around 33 rings for the first 10mm. the left side where its tighter and where i have cut to get my last braces is nearly impossible to count without a microscope but looks like about 4 -5 rings per mm.
This 22mm wide piece probably took 80yrs to grow. This piece and most my other pieces started out at about 150mm wide (545yrs each). I certainly hope the tree these came from died of natural causes.

10m spacing. FYI: Pencil is stamped as .3mm lead.
Approx 45 rings per 10mm

I haven't measured the stiffness of this properly, but i just stuck this piece in the vice (23mm x 20mm, 550mm lengh with 350mm sticking out the top of the vice), put my whole weight on it to try and bend. The back half of my bench lifted off the ground before I could see the king billy bending at all.
My bench is 1600 x 800 with 40mm tassie oak top, 120x120 maple legs. Lets just say its fricken heavy and therefore the king billy brace stock is bloody stiff.
And there's plenty more where these pieces came from (about 2cubic metres of the stuff)

[routout]

I used the end of a needle under the scope then gave up after loosing count .Used KB as a top it sounds OK left it a little thicker

[Steve.Toscano]

I just measured the Young's Modulus of the King billy - same piece from the end grain photo above and got: 32.98 Gpa

King Billy Young's Modulus

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If i understand this correctly it is super stiff stuff.

[kiwigeo]

I just measured the Young's Modulus of the King billy - same piece from the end grain photo above and got: 32.98 Gpa

youngs.png

If i understand this correctly it is super stiff stuff.

That's alot stiffer than the stuff Ive got in my shop......the highest Youngs Modulus values I got were around 6GPa.

Your wood is John Holmes wood....perfect for falcate braces.....

[curly]

There is a single stem Huon in the upper Gordon that has been core sampled and counted to 3500 years . The mount read stand go back over 10000 but that's a large clonal stand that's reproduced by layering , they are all one tree. Dendrochronological sequencing gets back the ten thousand years , beyond that the woods rotten . Durable !!
I handled a stick of King Billy ( could just have well been Athrotaxus cupressoides- pencil pine ) that had 473 growth rings across 50 mm . Imperceptible without the use of a loupe.
It's pretty devastating when you think of the King Billy and pencil pines lost in last summers fires . I find it hard to think about .
The black woods I'm cutting currently seem to max out at 80 to 100 years . The oldest I've done was 120 or so . They have fantastically high and also even growth rates .
Pete
Curly timbers

[Steve.Toscano]

That's alot stiffer than the stuff Ive got in my shop......the highest Youngs Modulus values I got were around 6GPa.

Measured a few other pieces picked at random from my pile - ranges from 12 gpa - 38 gpa

Your wood is John Holmes wood....perfect for falcate braces.....

[jeffhigh]

That's alot stiffer than the stuff Ive got in my shop......the highest Youngs Modulus values I got were around 6GPa.

Measured a few other pieces picked at random from my pile - ranges from 12 gpa - 38 gpa

Your wood is John Holmes wood....perfect for falcate braces.....

Very unlikely, recheck, Id be expecting 5-8 Gpa

[Steve.Toscano]

Very unlikely, recheck, Id be expecting 5-8 Gpa

I rechecked a few pieces as i was going, it's correct. The one piece pictured above I rechecked again yesterday out of curiousity after cutting some more bracing from it, and yep was the same results - although at a smaller piece.
Keep in mind this is all super close grain - most are 25+ rings per 10mm. Yesterday I also picked the 'worse' piece visually (that i could see, didnt check all of them) out of the stack and it was 12rings per 10mm. With 10 gpa.
I checked a couple of pieces of my engelmann brace stock - ranges between 7 - 13 gpa which is about right for engelmann so i hear. Not people with good king billy to compare results to.

[jeffhigh]

Using your figures Felix, I get the same result, But at 5 times the regular stiffness without a high density there is something happening, perhaps an interaction between modes that is preventing you measuring the fundamental frequency?
It would warrant static deflection testing to confirm.

[Steve.Toscano]

Using your figures Felix, I get the same result, But at 5 times the regular stiffness without a high density there is something happening, perhaps an interaction between modes that is preventing you measuring the fundamental frequency?
It would warrant static deflection testing to confirm.

I've never done this testing prior to this (so it is likely i am mucking it up somewhere) but i dont know where I could be going wrong. The dimensions and weight are what they are - unless my scales and/or ruler is out .
Which leaves only the frequency.
The above one: The Freq is the 1 of 2 peaks i get when useing the method shown by Trevor. The 2nd peak is much lower in db (i would hardly even call it a peak, but its there) then the 693 shown and is up around 2500hz by memory.
The spreadsheet was provided by Trevor, so i can only assume the formula is correct.

The fact im getting what would appear to be normal results for my engelmann stock useing the same methods makes me think I'm doing it all correct.

I will consult 'the book' tonight and double check.

[jeffhigh]

The calculations look fine, the measurements and weight are producing an appropriate density, the frequency is what I would suspect.