What makes hard woods hard

What makes a wood hard or soft? What types of trees are hardwood and softwood? Stay tuned for Part 2! Do you need whole log lumber? Next Post Hardwood Vs. Softwood: Understanding The Difference, Part 2. Updating Your Home?

So, you might think The most likely reason has to do with logging back in the old days. Farmers clearing their land in the east back in the 18th and 19th centuries would have encountered a great range of deciduous trees, scientifically categorized as angiosperms, those that have broad leaves, true flowers, have their seeds enclosed in a fruit, and shed their leaves in the fall they are deciduous.

The soil of the eastern part of North America was typically thick and rich in the valleys, because of the ancient age of the Appalachian mountains and the temperate climate that inhibited frequent and large wildfires. The result was a widely ranging deciduous forest, and the varied species that made them up consisted of a large percentage of oak, hickory, and maple. The oaks and hickories were spread far and wide by animals that loved the mast nuts produced by them, and recycled them periodically in their ramblings.

Maples, on the other hand, are prodigious self-seeders; their seeds are encompassed in a light fruit sack that has wings which take the seeds on a flight of the wind's fancy. They are also powerful stump sprouters, and reproduce themselves easily even when the farmers cut them down for timber or firewood.

So, maple trees are everywhere in the Northeast, and provide it with lots of syrup in the early spring and color in the fall. Now, the folks that were out there clearing all these oaks, hickories, and maples with axes and two-man saws, and shaping them for utensils with draw knives, found them pretty tough customers. The oaks and hickories, in particular, are heavy woods, going from 60 to 70 pounds per cubic foot to kilograms per cubic meter.

And the folks down south, who were harvesting live oaks for ship timbers and bows, really had a chore Apparently, these "heavy" species technically, the ones with the highest "density" left enough of an impression on these pioneers that they generally thought of the deciduous angiosperms as "hard" wood, even though other species, such as cottonwood, aspen, American elm, and American chestnut, which were common back in those days, were quite a bit lighter.

The aptly named cottonwood weighs less than sixty pounds per cubic foot kilograms per cubic meter when green, and whittles easily with a dull pocket knife, as I found out as a kid, a long time ago. For this reason, cottonwood has always been one of my favorite trees Now, those old-timers generally didn't talk about different woods like scientists. They didn't have time or mental energy to waste thinking about the relative variability of wood properties expressed in different angiosperms at different moisture contents or growth rates.

They just knew that the deciduous trees really wore out their saws and axes, and their muscles As opposed to the gymnosperms, which are those cone-bearing coniferous trees that have needles and retain them in winter; that is, they stay green when the other trees drop their leaves. Softwoods on the other hand come from trees that are known as gymnosperms. The seeds of this type of tree have no covering althought they might fall to the ground in some form of protection eg. It is this that gives rise to their name, evergreens.

This means that deciduous trees produce hardwoods and evergreens produce softwoods. So is there any difference in density? There is some truth in the fact that evergreens are, in general less dense than deciduous trees, but there again, Balsa wood throws this argument to the sharks.

Balsa wood, which is classified as a hardwood is one of the lightest, least dense woods you can find. When it comes to wood flooring, there are two types: engineered and solid wood.