Author: OboeDad
Date: 2012-02-08 21:09
I am still learning from every post in this thread, so I much appreciate people chiming in.
When I googled "coefficient of thermal expansion" and "wood," I did find a possible distinction between expansion along the grain, vs. across the grain. Wood seems to be very stable dimensionally (in the face of temperature fluctuation) along the grain - much more so than many metals. However, the sources that I found have some disagreement about thermal expansion in the cross-grain dimension. I'm guessing that the "with grain" stability is more important than "cross-grain" for industrial applications???
By contrast, there seems to be wide agreement that moisture content can cause dramatic expansion/contraction of wood, and that denser woods are more highly affected than less dense woods.
Fun slide show on structural properties of wood:
http://www.swst.org/teach/teach2/properties2.pdf
(Well, "fun" might be an overstatement, but at least it's colorful.)
Table of coefficients of thermal expansion (though I don't completely trust this, as there are some formatting issues, repeated data, etc.):
http://inspectapedia.com/exterior/Coefficients_of_Expansion.htm
- P
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