Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Carruth
Wood also seems to lose toughness as it ages, and I have noticed that Torrefied wood is less shock resistant and more likely to crack than wood that was not so treated.
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This may not be related to 'toughness' but when I move about 7 years ago to a new place and built my shop up it was built in an old barn, probably about 80 years at this point, which had siding of huge White Oak timbers. I found it next to impossible to hammer nails into it and my guess was that it was because it was old.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Arnold
I was party to an experiment to determine the effect of torrefaction. One half of a bookmatched red spruce top was torrefied. The two halves were then thicknessed and trimmed for width so that they were identical. The torrefied half was both lighter and stiffer than the nontorrefied half. I think this would translate to less bellying, but only if the top was left at the same thickness.
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This sort of confirms my intuition. I only started using T-Wood a few years ago but it always seemed to me to be the stiffest tops I have handled. And my defection testing indicated this as well. For example the tops I build for my small parlor guitars are usually around .09 to .1 inch deflecting at .4in. The last one i built with a T top deflecting at the same .4in was .07in thick.
It also feels brittle. That might have some relationship to the stiffness.