Wood Cutting and Timber Machining

Industrial woodcutting processes like sanding, plaining and routing have long been used in industry to cut wood products such as fibre boards or rare dense woods into boards with relatively consistent densities; however, applying these same skills to solid timber poses both scientific and technical difficulties due to its strong anisotropies and wide variations of porosity present across most species.

Orthogonal and oblique cutting modes tend to yield excellent relationships between shearing stress (FT), which serves as the dominant loading direction, and the density of wood species - even those with very inhomogeneous structures or high porosity levels.

Under certain regimes of rake angle, depth of cut, and cutting speed, there exists an excellent correlation between compression (or flexural) strain at rupture and wood density - an effect applicable both axial and transverse shear loading (Fig 1).





epoxy resin infusion However, these relations become less reliable for large sections of compression and tension wood located on logs cut for timber production. Due to their difficult detection and ineffective assessment criteria used to quantify them (Cool 2011; Goli 2003), many instances of these conditions go undetected and without consumer approval (Cool 2011; Goli 2003). Other assessment criteria which are more sensitive to wood anatomy variations include visual and tactile indicators like raised grain, fuzzy or torn grains, or machining traces or splinters resulting from machine cuts (Khazaeian 2006; Rajemison 2013). To enhance these assessments contactless devices can be utilized and 3D surface roughness criteria taken into consideration variation of valley depth parameters or features of anisotropy can also help.