wood is an incredibly flexible material, however like whatever else, it has its limits. develop a chair from weak wood as well as the worst that can occur is most likely not that bad. however if you develop machine tools from wood, the stakes for utilizing the wrong wood can be a bit higher.

That’s the believing behind the wood stamina testing configuration [Matthias Wandel] came up with. Previously, he had a somewhat jury-rigged test configuration with a hydraulic bottle jack to apply force to the test piece as well as a bathroom scale to make measurements. That configuration was suboptimal, so version two utilized a jackscrew to apply the force, however the bathroom scale still left the measurements available to interpretation. version three, the topic of the video below, went with strain gauges as well as an A/D converter linked to a Raspberry Pi to automate data collection. The jackscrew was likewise integrated into the test configuration with a stepper motor and, of course, [Matthias]’ famous wooden gears.

While the test rig is quite simple in design, there’s a great deal of subtlety to the calibration to make sure that it’s measuring the test material itself as well as not just compliance within the mechanism. It’s just one more in a long line of data-gathering exercises that [Matthias] seems to groove on, like his recent woodshop electrical explorations.