Hardened Super Wood! - Can It Rival Steel?

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There are a few ways to harden wood and make it more useful as material for buildings, tools, and even weapons and armor. How about taking it to the next level, with a treatment that makes it able to withstand getting stabbed with a screwdriver? It can even be molded, so imagine everything that can be done with leather, but now it's harder than even the densest exotic hardwoods. Fascinating stuff!

*** Time Stamps ***

00:00 – 00:41 Intro / Research article
00:41 – 01:48 Thorum rings
01:48 – 02:32 What wood is made of
02:32 – 03:57 How they densified basswood (23 times harder!)
03:57 – 05:32 How does it compare to metal?
05:32 – 06:11 Potential for making armor
06:11 – 07:49 Application in construction (nails)
07:49 – 09:25 Can a HW knife REALLY be 3x sharper than steel?
09:25 – 10:19 Usefulness / TRANSPARENT augmented wood
10:19 – 10:39 Inspiration for fiction (Solarpunk, high-tech elves)
10:39 – 12:47 Historical “what ifs” (improved war clubs & armor)
12:47 – 13:12 Daggers, swords, axes made of super wood?
13:12 – 14:55 Final thoughts / outtakes / outro

Other related videos:

"MAIL" Armor Like You've Never Seen Before!

Testing Post-Apocalyptic Gear: Duct Tape Armor!

The WORST Knife Ever Reviewed!

*** Sources ***

Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic

Researchers Make Wood Stronger than Steel

Schematics overview of the major wood components, cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin

Transparent wood: the building material of the future?

Wood Hardness Chart

Wood hardness according to Brinell scale

Hardness of mild steel, bronze, oak

Pacific Island War Clubs from Polynesia

*** Music ***

Outtakes:
"Little People At Work" by Horrorpen
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY 3.0)

Outro:
"Highland Storm" by The Slanted Room Records
Used with artist's permission

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[ArmchairDeity]

You got me at “wood harder than steel”, but I doubled down at “forget wood so hard you can drive nails with it, you can have wood so hard it becomes the nail”. 😉

[papawheely]

So, what I'm hearing from all of this is that medium and heavy wood armours for druids are not unrealistic.

[Nurkmrath]

One thing a lot of people seem to forget is that people nailed things together with wood all the time back in the day. They just started with a drill. The whole process is called "pegging, " and it was the preferred method of attaching things on ships, even when nails were available.

The main benefit I can see to this research into hardened wood is the ability to keep making modern materials after we exhaust readily available supplies of limited resources, like oil, which is necessary for plastics. I don't see it replacing steel anytime soon, but sooner or later we will have to replace our reliance on various plastics with something else, and this could be part of the answer.

[palarious]

I've been following this tech for years. It has HUGE applications in the construction sphere, beyond just flooring and wood nails, which would be great in cabinetry applications.

[GusCraft]

While straight up replacing nails may be out of the question, wood peg construction would become much stronger.

[DrexisEbon]

Yo imagine fantasy elf armor made of refined hardwood. Fantasy dwarven armor thickness, but on tall elegant figures with a more fitting elvan theme.

[what]

Even if this makes for a more economical and timely replacement for slower growing and rarer hard wood, that would be amazing! Like, if you could grow a field of pine or basswood in a year and convert it into a harder wood for furniture or whatever else you would usually use hardwood for, instead of using pine or maple that take years and years to grow, that's amazing.

[jamesfrankiewicz]

Some of those hardwoods tend to fracture easily, I wonder how this stuff holds up that way. Note: if you want to make staves or practice swords for sparring/impact practice, make sure to research which hardwoods are good for that, and watch out for grain structure (you want that as parallel to the length of your staff/wooden sword as reasonable possible).

[therealsokratis]

Skall! Source some of that material to do a video series with a bladesmith. That would be one of the coolest set of videos ever!!

[roanoake]

I think what’s interesting too with the journalism and how these sorts of things is how hardness and strength are conflated - hardness only refers to how resistant to scratching a material is, while strength has to do with how much force a material can take in a unit of area, and toughness is the amount of deflection the material can handle without plastic deformation

[yammoto]

I wonder how hardened wood, compares to naturally hard wood.

Take Accadia as an example, its flame resistant, shock resistant, and is in fact so dense you can't make paper or rubber from it. But it makes very good furniture, housing, and clubs, the Zulu Knobkierre is no joke thanks to this.

[thetux]

As a follow-up, you could look into artificially petrified wood. I did a bit of research into it for reference in petrified wood as a building material in a fantasy setting.

[theforcedmeme]

The double entendre is strong in this one

[Khae.]

Solar punk, high-tech elves, damn I love those kinds of things

[Lee-vkxy]

One of the highest signal to noise ratio videos I've seen (not just on youtube). Thanks.

[comradebork]

5:39 And wooden armor doesn't interfere with spellcasting.

[James-epbx]

The idea of wooden armor reminds me of the time someone, mythbusters I think, tested the idea of scalemail made from paper, and got surprisingly good results

[lairdcummings]

Pretty rings. Cool stuffs.
Now, back to playing with our wood... The problem with replacing plastic and softer steels with wood is that it is much less simple to create, requiring more cost to obtain similar utility, and doesn't adapt well to industrial scale. That mitigates against widespread utility.

[Ian-npzt]

You're right Skall. Good eye. For practical purposes a wood nail would not hold up to the fortitude of a steel nail. The reason being, that the wood nail would splinter. This is the exact reason why house frames are built with nails and not screws. When the house settles or moves it puts a lot of force on the joints. Nails are built to bend mutliple times with that movement. Screws break and fracture under such force. If an entire house were built like this, one joint failure would lead to a domino effect. Which would cause a massive catastrophic failure. Not even sure the wood version of a screw would hold up to the torque judging by how daintily they tapped that nail in.

[johno.]

Nilered has a very detailed video of making this hardened wood and seeing if it can be bullet proof! I haven't seen anyone else mention it in the comments yet, but I definitely recommend it.