The musings of an expert timber consultant...Jim Coulson branches out
There’s no such thing as wood. At first, this sounds like a surprising statement, coming as it does from a consultant timber technologist: but if you stop for a moment and think about all the possible things that can be made from wood, you should soon realise that it is quite crazy to assume that all of the different jobs that wood is needed for could be done by a single, uniform and basic material. To understand my argument better, just try changing the material—and imagine the puzzlement if you were to ask a specialist stock-holder just for some metal to do a specific job with. He would immediately ask you if you wanted steel, brass, bronze, aluminium, copper, mercury (which is liquid at room temperature), sodium (which explodes on contact with water), calcium (yes, that’s a metal as well)...and so on. He’d then ask you what exactly you were proposing to do with it.
No catch-all description
Just because all those different substances, with their huge range of properties, strengths and uses, are all
