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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (51513)	5/31/2000 5:50:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

We have a couple of different things to think about here. Wood and steel are both elastic. Steel will take a bend and hold it. Wood won't; it just makes these annoying cracking sounds if you press your luck. When a spike gets driven into wood (before also, but I won't be super picky about this), it has a strong axis and a weak axis. The strong axis is the one that runs in the direction the hammer goes. (I think that is by design. But it's pretty cool anyway.) The weak axis is sideways, especially sideways going to and from (i.e. normal to the plane defined by) the large face[s] of a spike with rectangular cross section. Wood would have the stuff to bend steel into the weak plane, especially since the compressile strong axis of wood is at work here. (The grain.) (The end grain, specifically.) (If I remember my Carpentry for English Majors right.) So if a spike gets driven into wood, bent or not - it is being gripped by a great deal of elastic squeeze coming from the wood along its natural Vise-Grip axis. And this would tend to give the spike trmendous "hold" on the rail. About loosening. I think this would (wood) have to happen only if the spike or its spikehole are stressed beyond the elastic limit, either of the spike or its lignous matrix. And softwoods can take an awful amount of strain before they yell Uncle. That's what makes them such nice structural materials. (Hughes didn't build an Oak Ostrich, or a Maple Mother.) I'd guess any spike release wood be age-related. The elastic grip would be hardened by the elements into a sort of impotent gape. I'm guessing. Old nail holes, are they any less givey than fresh ones? btw Grub!