Presentation by: Lourdes Pernia

• Introduction• What is wood?• The use of wood• Modern wood• As a material

Wood has been with man since we learned to use tools for our advantage.

It helped build the first shelters and has been with us for construction and furniture ever since.

It is an important material and it has universal uses.

Audio presentation

Wood is an organic material that typically generates in trees as a result of the tree’s growth.

Biologically, wood is a cellulose composite that helps the distribution of water and nutrients, as well as provide structural support for the plant.

Since it is of organic origin, wood’s characteristics vary depending on the kind of tree it is taken from, and also it’s maturity.

The first uses given to wood didn’t even involve

processing it, and it was used as it was found, either as a weapon or as fuel for a fire. Later on, man learned to give shape to wood and made it useful to use with tools, and eventually for buildings and furniture. As we discovered more about its characteristics, we began using wood in everything we needed.

Wood’s natural floatability helped create the first boats, and until the 19th century, ships still used wood in their frames.

The natural resistance of wood helped create protected shelters for early man, and its heat isolation properties helped them remain warm during harsh weather.

The light weight, good resistance and easy manipulation made it a perfect material to develop more advance tools, like handles and cutlery, such as chopsticks, toothpicks, and other utensils, like the wooden spoon.

It is also good for furniture and decoration, a fact that stays true even today.

Many of the machines made before the invention of plastics had wood in them. The only effective replacement of wood in modern times, is actually still wood;

Engineered wood, a man-made material that uses different kinds of woods and chemicals to produce a homogeneous, cheaper and more resistant material, is used when large portions of continuous wood are needed, or when someone requires wood that doesn’t deteriorate in certain circumstances. It still requires natural wood as a base material and it’s not as versatile and aesthetic as natural wood.

Modern construction woods include plywood, products such as glued laminated timber (glulam), laminated veneer lumber, parallam and I-joists.

These are all light and resistant man-made woods, but they still fail to replace traditional building wood completely.

Wood portions that are unfit for construction can be processed into other useful materials such as chipboard, engineered wood, hardboard, medium-density fiberboard, oriented strand board. Such wood derivatives are widely used: wood fibers are an important component of most paper, and cellulose is used as a component of some synthetic materials.

Wood derivatives can also be used for all kinds of flooring, for example laminate flooring.

Wood as a construction material has a very long history. It is very easy to work with, when compared to stone, brick and metal. It offers resistance and strength without too much weight, and its one of the most basic structural materials there can be.

The early uses of wood in construction were that of providing the core structure of the building. Even in early stone houses and other buildings made entirely of non organic materials, a wooden frame would be necessary to hold the structure together and support its weight until it could be finished.

Because wood is cheap and versatile, it has been used for regular house building for a very long time. After the 19th century, with modern materials available, we still need wood in the construction process and also as part of the structure of some houses.

The end