Why are hardwoods deciduous

Softwoods are commonly used for interior mouldings, the manufacturing of windows, construction framing and generating sheet goods such as plywood and fibreboard. At Arnold Laver we have the broadest and most comprehensive range of softwood species and grades to cover all timber requirements.

We have a core range of softwoods held in stock at all of our branches, backed up by daily supplies from our National Distribution Centre. As well as standard products, bespoke requirements are our speciality, with machining, grading and treatment facilities available group-wide. In many cases, hardwoods and softwoods are both used for many of the same purposes. Generally, though, softwoods are cheaper and easier to work with.

Softwoods have a wide range of applications and are found in building components including components such as windows and doors , furniture and fibreboard. Though hardwoods are often more expensive and sometimes more difficult to work with, the benefit is that most though not all are denser, meaning they will last longer than softwoods. For this reason, hardwoods are often found in high-quality furniture, decks, flooring and construction that is designed to last.

As the timber experts, Arnold Laver has extensive in-house production facilities for the machining and manufacture of both hardwoods and softwoods.

We have modern and well-equipped factories located across several of our Depots, allowing us to provide an effective and timely service for a range of manufacturing requirements. Hardwoods tend to be more difficult to work with and perform best in high-traffic usage, such as flooring and furniture. Hardwoods are darker in color above has dark stain and are ideal for flooring and cabinetry. So, back to that winning game-show question. Vincent, Sales Representative.

Search for:. Softwood and Hardwood: Cone vs. Nut, Not Weak vs. 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. Engineered wood flooring is made up of layers of ply that are bonded together to create a solid and stable core board, which is then topped off with a solid wood top layer or lamella.

Solid wood flooring, as its name suggests is made up of solid planks of one species of wood. Although pine flooring is reasonably common and popular because of its low cost, it is less resistant to wear and tear than the likes of oak. As we spread out into the rest of the country, our common man's classification system began to break down.

As we harvested the Lake States to build Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit, we found that aspen was a pretty "soft" deciduous tree, even though we had already mentally tagged the leaf-shedders as hardwoods. And early settlers out west found abundant red alder, a light-weight hardwood that has somewhat the look, weight, and feel of Western red cedar. But the folks harvesting the southern U. Southern pine not only has a relatively high density when dry try driving a nail into a southern pine stud with ten or more growth rings per inch, and you'll bend a few nails but it also has a resinous "pine tar" that served navies well in the wooden ship days.

As a result, old southern pine trees could yield pitch-filled logs that could weigh as much as oak even though the specific gravity the weight of a wood species relative to the weight of water is quite a bit lower than those tough old oaks and hickories.

As you can see in the picture of southern pine cell structure, softwoods are comprised of long, thin tubular cells, and it is these that carry the water through the stem of the tree. It is this uniformity, in addition to the density of the wood, which makes softwoods seem relatively soft when being sawn or machined. On the other hand, the moisture is transported in hardwoods through larger diameter pores, or vessels.

These come in different shapes, sizes, and locations in the different hardwood species, and this variation contributes to the woodworker's sense that certain hardwoods are rough, or "hard" to saw and machine.

Nowadays, wood "hardness" is complicated or, depending on your point of view, simplified further by hardness standards developed and adopted for wood grading for different products. The most commonly used hardness metric used in the various wood industries is the "Janka-ball" hardness test, which is the amount of pounds-force lbf or newtons N required to imbed a.

These standardized results are then used as a relative measure of the hardness of a wood, the results of which are fairly easy to find on the web. If you browse a Janka hardness table, you'll see that the hardest woods are tropical hardwood species, but then below that, softwoods and hardwoods are relatively randomly mixed.