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none of those ever made it to very high levels of industrial adoption.

Non-exotic methods of strengthening wood, made it to high levels of production in spades: plywood, oriented strand board, microlam and glulam beams, and medium density fiber board (MDF) are direct examples. Wood I-joists and plate connected wood trusses are less direct. From a functional standpoint, standardization of lumber grades is a social technology that allows designing wood members with known engineering properties.

On the chemical front, pressure treated lumber increases wood's strength across a timeline. Fire treatment increases wood strength in a narrow set of circumstances.

Of these, plywood is clearly the most successful in terms of industrial adoption being used for aircraft, boats, and furniture among other things.

Yes, engineered wood is a mainstay of construction. But all of those processes were and are set up to be able to process a large volume in a relatively short time and leave very little to no waste, and what waste there is is sold off as fuel.

Plywood - especially the higher grades - is amazing stuff. I visited a plywood factory in Ontario and it really opened my eyes to how clever and precise the manufacturing of various kinds of engineered wood is.

It is, the WWII Mosquito Fighter-Bomber was made from high grade ply and it flew faster than contemporary aluminium fighters, was incredibly durable (except for some de-lamination problems in hot humid far-east environs) and was actually stunningly beautiful.

Also mostly plywood: the Spruce Goose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules

which is simply massive: 320 ft wingspan, the largest of any flown aircraft.

Haha, that was the first aircraft I thought of too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito

The earlier de Havilland Comet was also incredibly beautiful and made by innovative woodworking techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_DH.88_Comet?oldfo..., one of my favorite planes ever.

I too was surprised to find out just how much variety and quality of plywood there is. I always thought it was a relatively cheap, kind of crappy alternative to good lumber. But since I've started following hobby laser cutting, I've been finding out that good plywood really makes a difference if you want good results.

I've had really good experiences with birch based plywood of the better grades and for heavier applications a grade that is used in construction to make the forms for concrete casting.

Plywood: How it's made;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGnr8ATHHX8

Where in Ontario? This would be interesting to see for myself.

Thessalon iirc on Hwy 17.

There’s also stabilized wood. You basically fill all the space inside the wood with a hard resin. Small pieces are used for things like jewelry, knife scales, etc.

At what point do we have to stop considering processed wood as wood, but as a wood/resin or wood/adhesive composite?

Sometime after we stop considering processed food as food, but a food/sugar or food/preservative composite.

Stabilized wood definitely has a lot more in common with resin than with wood, in its mechanical properties.

Your comment reminded me of a technique that guitar makers have been using in recent years, which is to make wood more stable by roasting it in a kiln (which removes the moisture from the wood, and supposedly increases its stability).

If by "recent" you mean developed about 200 years ago, then yes.

From what I've seen, it's become more popular recently (last 10 years).

Its a technique older than guitars, not recent at all. Maybe you just took notice?

well at the very least the technique has been packaged/marketed as “torrefied wood”, and i think that’s what is being referenced here

Yep, plywood gets a bad rap: it's incredibly strong stuff. Aircraft plywood can be used to build entire aircraft, marine plywood can withstand harsh weather conditions for years, and birch or hardwood plywood can look very pretty.

Some plywood is amazing. Most is crap. Generally the stuff you buy at home depot for $25/sheet is crap.

And people tend to confuse plywood with OSB, MDO, MDF, etc.

And while marine plywood (BS-1088) is great stuff, and fir marine plywood is also pretty nice stuff, it's not magic. BS-1088 is will rot in a morning dew and fir checks horribly. You have to protect it carefully and keep it protected.

Plywood is the best combination of strength, weathering resistance, and workability of any material I've yet used. MDF is way cheaper, but it is so much weaker pound-for-pound[1].

1: One carpenter I talked to complained that MDF won't hold screws, and apparently this is a common complaint, but if you drill properly sized pilot holes and use sheetmetal screws it's pull-out strength is fine, particularly since you need thicker MDF than ply, so you can use a longer screw.

The primary advantage of MDF is dimensional stability. Dimensional stability is highly desirable for surfaces receiving veneers or high pressure ("plastic") laminate finishes. It's not really intended for structural applications, but for furniture and cabinetry it can be a reasonable option.

Another advantage MDF has is that it's heavy. Granted for most things you'd rather have light, but for stuff like speaker cabinets and sound deadening you want heavy.

Also, MDF makes a bad material for speaker cabinets. A good speaker cabinet not only is heavy, it have a really good characterized sound qualities that MDF, plastic or cheap plywood can't give. Because that are expensive!

Fire treated wood is called 'shou-sugi-ban' in Japanese and is occasionally used in commercial and residential applications. Fire treated wood has the benefit of being naturally fire-resistant, insect resistant, and water/rot resistant while also being a natural treatment (as opposed to a man-made chemical treatment.)

https://shousugiban.org/

https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/materi...

HGTV's Fixer Upper had an episode where this treatment was used. They were fixing up an old boathouse and decided to use this method for the exterior.

There is still a street in Pittsburgh that is end-grain wood blocks. (In Shadyside, a short residential street.) They continue to treat it with tar. So I wonder if it was a similar idea.

Any chance you can find a google street view link for this?

I found this image, but it's from Philadelphia:

http://www.philly.com/philly/living/20151225_Changing_Skylin...

This might be what you're thinking of: http://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Best-of-the-Burgh-Blogs/Th...

Here's a street view link: https://goo.gl/maps/smQp7BpkgHF2

It's a bit of a random little stub street, so I'd never noticed it during my 4 years of undergrad, but it's a neat lil artifact.

There's a tiny amount left in London:

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2015/01/10/the-time-when-lo...

This seems to be a topic which animates a certain kind of urbanist nerd (of whom Ian Visits is the prince):

http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/wood/

http://www.endgrain.org.uk/history/

That last page is from some Welsh applied research project on using more endgrain wood for surfaces; there's lots more interesting material on that site.

Sorry to go on a tangent, but your comment reminded me of a book I read about the Chinese culinary culture pre-revolution. Chinese chefs had, and may still have, wooden cutting boards that were conditioned somehow such that they were as hard as stone. (There was also an implication that they resisted bacteria unlike normal wood boards when not scoured properly.) These boards were passed down from generation to generation.

The bit about the cutting boards being as hard as stone, is that pure hyperbole or is it possible?

Doesn't having a cutting board as hard as stone defeat the purpose of having a cutting board?

Isn't the point of a cutting board to protect the counter top from the knife, mobility (move chopped food to another location) and being easy to clean? As opposed to a flat counter top which can get marred with marks, can't move, can be cleaned but not thrown in a sink.

They also protect the knife blade from damage: if you were to cut directly on stone, the knife hitting the stone would cause it to dull more quickly.

Also to provide a less damaging surface for the knife blade.

I'd say a much more important purpose of a cutting board is to protect the edge of your knife. If you hit the edge of your knife on something really hard, it'll chip, or fold--basically just ruin it. This might not be such a big deal for home cooks with super dull knives (after all, glass cutting boards still exist for some reason!) but for a professional I'd think a cutting board that destroys your knives would be worse than useless.

The purpose of a cutting board is to protect the things underneath it that are not as hard as stone.

Then you could just use a metal plate or glass, but we use the wood in order to protect the blade of the knife also. You'd have to re-sharp the chef knifes every few minutes if they were used on the surface harder than the blade.

You should, and it's called steeling.

There's a foil edge on very sharp knives that will wrinkle and fold after use on anything, even tomatoes, making the knife feel dull. It's not, and it doesn't require removing metal as with grinding or sharpening, but you can steel to realign that edge or strop to hone it depending on the blade and angle. Even if you don't work with blades often, you've probably seen this depicted in media.

It really doesn't matter what the cutting surface is to the knife if you have great technique. Since I don't always, I use thin, flexible plastic barriers. I would never recommend wood outside of having no other choices or using it as part of presentation, mainly because of cross contamination and difficulty in sanitizing if you cook sous vide or serve raw often.

Obviously I meant the stone sharpening, not using the knife steel. And as for the material, many sources say that plastic actually contains more bacteria and that end-grain wood is more gentle to a blade than plastic. On the other hand plastic is easier to clean when it's new, but it's also more prone to cuts than wood and they quickly get dirty (at least in my limited experience). IMHO every board needs to be scraped or sanded from time to time to remove the top layer completely, that's the only way to keep it clean.

My guess is that these wood boards would have much less friction than a stone equivalent, unless you had enough money to pay for a polished one.

You'd destroy your knives/cleavers with a stone cutting board. The wood needs to give a little bit so the blade doesn't chip and holds an edge long enough to be useful. Sounds like pop writing sensationalism, as with Damascus steel, which TV shows imply (or outright state if they have no shame) is better than any steel we currently know how to make.

Hard as stone is probably meant in a figurative sense, not a literal sense. End-grain wood is pretty hard, especially when compressed (for instance: by beating it with a hammer), but it is nowhere near as hard as stone. That said, there are some pretty soft stones :)

I've broken more than one high quality steel bit on various kinds of wood, but that's usually not a measure of how hard the wood is but how much friction there is between the drill and the wood and how much of the drill bit is inside the wood. If the wood were really hard you would not be able to enter the bit at all and it would never break but just sit there spinning on the surface.

Finally, the whole trick to a cutting board is that end grain wood will wear very little and the knife will be sharp much longer specifically because it is not as hard as stone.

Yes, many Chinese chefs and households still do use wooden chopping boards. I am not sure if the boards are as hard as stones, since there are many different kinds of stones. But thickness and the type of wooden do matter and will certainly make the wood very hard to crack (and to burn).

Here are some videos for the readers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTNVDH6ZFLg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isFTIHy7Duo

You will see pork bone chopping (beginning of the video), skin slicing (1:40), and meat grinding (5:30) in the second video.

Those are very typical boards in a restaurant's kitchen. The typical household chop board is a lot smaller and thinner, probably around 35" wide x 5" high. However, many families have moved away from wooden chopping board because plastic boards are easier to clean.

As far as resistance to bacteria, that will fall short with science. The passing down from generation to generation is a cultural effect. If you live with your in-laws, the board will of course be reused. Since wooden boards don't crack for years, yes, the board will be passed down. Butchers (Chinese and other cultures) use wooden boards because of the durability (Chinese chefs love chopping real fast with force). Real chefs prefer wooden chopping board (yeah, your famous Gordon Ramsay!)

Also, it is very common to see a butcher or a chef to stick the big kitchen knife on the side of the board tilted like the Leaning Tower of Pisa :-) The strength of a real butcher or a real chef can be so much more powerful than a MMA boxer.

EDIT: If you want a short English intro on this topic, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDdoht0e1sg is solid.

Bamboo cutting boards are often advertised as having anti-microbial properties. No clue if there's any scientific backing to the claim, though.

My experience with bamboo is that it's far more vulnerable to mildew than similarly-utilised wood items.

Do you mind sharing a picture of this done right? The end grain wood floor pics I found on Google look mostly hideous to me.

Not OP, but I found some interesting information here.

http://kaswell.com/about-us/history-of-woodblock/

Looks like it's good for outside flooring. Actually doesn't look that bad when used for that either, kind of like bricks.

(Actual gallery here http://kaswell.com/gallery/)

It also was a traditional flooring for workshops, because it tolerated heavy abuse.

More pics: https://www.google.de/search?q=stirnholzparkett&source=lnms&...

This used to be very common for machine shops to have wood floors, I found an article detailing it with some pictures. I worked in a couple shops that had wood floors, they were nothing to look at, it was an industrial setting after all. https://web.pa.msu.edu/services/machine-shop/shopfloor.htm

At Amazon in the new Day 1 building their main staircase to the lobby is built from wood ends and it is done very nicely. It looks great. There's probably pictures online of that.

edit, I found one picture from a geekwire article. Unfortunately you can't see the grain, the picture is from a far. https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/20161107...

>This used to be very common for machine shops to have wood floors

That is done because wood is soft and if you drop a tool or part on the floor it's far less likely to be damaged. Wood has been superseded by (usually vinyl IIRC) tile and/or rubber/plastic mats in a lot of places.

It's also done for the comfort of the people working there. Standing on concrete all day is more tiring than on a wooden floor.

Boulevard Brewery in KC has part of their event space floored with end grain. Overview pic: https://www.boulevard.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/BHB-7.j...

Closer up:https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0a/df/ba/b1/...

Here's a picture of the floor of the Square Root Restaurant in Brevard NC: https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g48979-d...

Each block is 6"x6" (15cm x 15cm) of pine. Apparently it lasts a long time, but took a long time to install.

I work at Red Wing Shoe Company, and our office has this type of flooring on the first floor: https://i.imgur.com/arWH5NR.jpg

That's gorgeous.

The labor cost to do it today would be substantial, I'm estimating it's around 4k-5k sqft of 2"x4" blocks!

The entrance to Trinity College Dublin is an 18th century gatehouse where the floor is made of hexagonal wooden blocks that have weathered quite well.

The story does make a lot of references to previous work done, and even has a quote about how this method seems expensive and no better than existing methods.

It looks like the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476) provides the detail you are looking for.

After a bit of searching, the only descriptions of cutting board compression techniques I've been able to find are compressed perpendicular to your description.

Do you have a good source for more info on axially compressed end grain flooring or cutting board construction techniques?

https://www.google.nl/search?q=butchers+block&client=firefox...

Plenty of floor links already in this thread.

There are no links or threads related to axial compression. I guess your original post ment that it is compressed during use rather than constrution.

It can be either way. The 'during construction' bit is done using compacting hammers and then afterwards it is sanded down again to expose the grain, the pounding can splinter the topmost layer. And after the sanding the floor is nice and smooth, the pounding leaves it somewhat uneven because the wood isn't equal density everywhere.

You can drop a hammer head down on that stuff and it won't even leave a dent.

>making it effectively thinner, lighter and stronger at the same time.

The article never says it's lighter, and the paper is behind a paywall. Interesting process none the less.

It does say it is lighter, it says it removes certain compounds from the wood and then compresses the remainder without further additives. So it is lighter than the original wood but much more dense.

I mean I agree it's likely that the process makes the wood lighter. But no, the article doesn't explicitly say the end result is lighter. It explicitly says it's thinner and stronger.

I don't really know much about the process or whether the chemical treatment can potentially make the wood heavier/absorb some of the liquid, which would offset the weight of the material that's lost.

My point wasn't that there's no way the result is lighter. My point was that the article didn't mention the weight before and after, so it seemed presumptuous to me to claim it was definitely lighter.

I went to check the actual paper to confirm, hit a paywall, and so was unable to verify. I was hoping someone would comment with more details.