TYING WOOD IN A KNOT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 70, 23 March 1940, Page 4 (Supplement)

TYING WOOD IN A KNOT.

Knots in wood arc familiar enough, but at Princcs Jlisborough, Government laboratory for forest woods, they will hand a visitor a strip of beechwood to tie into a knot with his hands. It can .then be untied and straightened out again as if nothing had happened to it. It is as flexible as a hard rope, and is a forest product of the laboratory, with an unforeseen future before it. The process is an extension of one for bending it without breaking. First the wood i* steamed, then compressed at both ends in a concertina fashion so as to follow the fibres, until it has lost from a sixth to a third of its length. When cooled it is found to be so flexible that it can be bent double, and will neither break nor spring "back to its original position. It has lost its elasticity, and substituted flexibility. This is the first stage of invention in a new wood substance which may prove to have many uses. Ash and elm, as well as beech, have yielded to the treatment. It remains to be seen whether the wood strips, after this severe compression of their fibres, will prove durable. When Pope wrote "As the twig is bent the tree's inclined," he had no such ideas as the modern scientific foresters.