Effect of Finger Profile on Static Bending Strength Performance of Finger-Jointed Wood

To study the efficient usage of small diameter logs and woods containing defects such as knots, slope of the grain and decay, six types of finger-jointed woods with various finger profiles were made of poplar, pine and oak with different density. We investigated the effect of finger profile on static bending strength performances of finger-jointed woods. The efficiency of bending MOE, MOR and deflection showed the highest value in poplar finger-jointed wood with the lowest density of three species, and the lowest value in oak finger-jointed wood with the highest density of three species. The values markedly decreased with increasing finger pitch for finger-jointed wood glued with polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) resin for all tested species, whereas for the finger-jointed wood glued with resorcinol-phenol formaldehyde (RPF) resin, the influence of finger pitch on the efficiency of MOE was not found in all tested species, and those on the efficiency of MOR and deflection indicated the same trend as finger-jointed wood glued with PVAc resin in the case of pine and oak finger-jointed wood with higher densities. It was found that the values tended to decrease with increasing density of species on the whole and the desirable finger pitches were L (6.8 mm) for poplar, M (4.4 mm) for pine and S (3.5 mm) for oak in a view of economy. For finger-jointed wood glued with PVAc resin, the fitness between a tip and a root width of a pair of fingers δ of 0.5 mm indicated the highest efficiency of MOE for all species. And, the influence of δ on MOR was only found in oak finger-jointed wood glued with RPF resin and the desirable δ value for oak was 0.1 mm. However, it was found that the influence of δ on the strength performance was very small.