What Is The Hardest Hardwoods

The most durable flooring woods will be hardwoods such as oak walnut ebony maple ash and pecan.

What is the hardest hardwoods. Softwoods such as fir pine and hemlock rarely work well as flooring materials except in a shop or utility area. The janka hardness scale ranks wood for density and is a reliable indicator of floor durability in regard to hardness and denting the higher the rating the more resistant the floor is to dents scratches and wear. Because hardness is an important factor and hardness. Generally acknowledged as the hardest wood lignum vitae guaiacum sanctum and guaiacum officinale measures in at 4 500 pounds force lbf on the janka scale.

Red oak one of the most common hardwood flooring species ranks 1 290. The most common test for testing wood hardness is known as the janka hardness test. And while this example lists just some of the most popular hardwood species there are hundreds of varieties representing the north american hardwood population. The hardest commercially available hardwood is hickory and it is five times harder than aspen one of the soft hardwoods.

The actual number listed in the wood profile is the amount of pounds force lb f or newtons n required to imbed a 444 11 28 mm diameter steel ball into the wood to half the ball s diameter. This light colored wood is seen almost as frequently as oak and is usually not stained a dark color but is kept a natural whitish cream or sometimes stained an amber yellow it s commonplace in furniture flooring trim and in places where a pale light colored wood is needed. For the hardest woods you need to look for exotics not domestics. That s more than twice as hard as osage orange one of the hardest domestic woods at 2 040 lbf and more than three times harder than red oak at 1 290 lbf.

The wood from hardwood trees tends to be harder because the trees grow at a slower rate giving the wood its greater density. This happens to be generally true but there are exceptions such as in the cases of wood from yew trees a softwood that is relatively hard and wood from balsa trees a. Classifying wood as either a hardwood or softwood comes down to its physical structure and makeup and so it is overly simple to think of hardwoods as being hard and durable compared to soft and workable softwoods. Some hardwoods are becoming very hard to find and are being harvested without concern to their eventual extinction brazilian rosewood comes to mind.

Not only is this hard on the environment it drives the price of the wood so high that making furniture out of it is out of the question for most woodworkers.