Is ramin wood a hardwood?

Is ramin wood a hardwood?

Breadcrumb. Ramin is an imported straw-coloured hardwood used for mouldings, flooring, plywood, picture frames. Other applications include dowels, handles, turnery and carving.

How strong is ramin wood?

Ramin is very similar to beech (Fagus sylvatica) in its general strength properties, but it is less tough and hard, and is weaker in shear, and unlike beech is unsatisfactory for bent work. It is however, much stronger in compression than beech.

Which hardwood is hardest?

hickory
The hardest commercially available hardwood is hickory, and it is five times harder than aspen, one of the “soft” hardwoods.

What is meranti wood?

A rich, straight-grain wood. Image Credit: roman_sh/iStock/Getty Images. Meranti is a versatile wood with many subspecies, sources and purposes. Philippine or Lauan mahogany is another, somewhat generic term for meranti that is harvested and is available in abundance on a worldwide basis.

What Colour is ramin wood?

Ramin is a pale hardwood ranging from almost white to yellow. It has a high strength to weight ratio and is good to work. It has a straight grain with very little figuring.

What is considered hard wood?

Hard wood is the wood that comes from flowering plants, also known as angiosperm. Angiosperm is a Greek term meaning “vessel seed.” These types of trees include walnut, maple, and oak trees. However, hardwood trees don’t include monocots like palm trees and bamboo.

What wood is the softest?

balsa tree
The balsa tree is a tropical plant which is grown across all continents. The trees are very fast-growing and reach a height of 30 to 45 meters. The stem has a smooth bark which is usually light-gray and may have white marbling. With a density of 0.1 to 0.2 g / cm³, balsa is the softest wood in the world.

Is meranti wood hard or soft?

Meranti is a soft to firm hardwood timber. Meranti is not subject to warping or twisting and is dent resistant. Because of its stability it can be used for a wide variety of applications.

How hard is meranti wood?

Meranti is a hardwood. On the Janka scale — a scale that ranks wood for hardness — meranti varieties rank between 800 and 825. For the sake of comparison, red oak ranks 1,290.

What kind of wood does Ramin live in?

Ramin (Gonystylus bancanus) is a strong, light-colored wood of fine texture and straight grain that becomes everything from dowels to plywood. And ramin prefers the low, canopied swamp—where little light penetrates—to more open—and drier—high-ground forest. That makes harvest difficult, but not impossible.

Is the Ramin Wood listed as an endangered species?

Pricing/Availability: Ramin has been over-exploited in the past, and is now listed on CITES Appendix II as an endangered species (this includes the entire Gonystylus genus). Although a strong and useful wood, many suitable domestic alternatives are much more readily available.

Are there any side effects to using Ramin?

Allergies/Toxicity: Although severe reactions are quite uncommon, Ramin has been reported to cause eye and skin irritation, as well as other side effects such as asthma-like symptoms and increased tendency for splinters to get infected. See the articles Wood Allergies and Toxicity and Wood Dust Safety for more information.

Where do you get Ramin wood in Malaysia?

To get ramin logs from the swamp, laborers build vast skidways. The peat can be up to 80′ deep in the forested, fresh-water swamps of Sarawak and neighboring Borneo in Malaysia. So, Caterpillar tractors and heavy trucks—the traditional log-harvesting machines of tropical forests—only bog down in the muck.