The engineering team at University of Bath have just sent us some photographs of their latest stress load tests on this new piece of carpentry technology that they’re developing for Rural Studio’s ‘1:1’ project. The images above, and directly below, show lots of shearing of wood against wood – and therefore loss of intrinsic strength.
The image at the bottom shows the solution they are going to propose for the Rural Studio ‘Woodhsed’ – a highly compressed birch plywood joint with the same tensile strength of steel – and which shows minimal shearing, and therefore increased strength and stability. It’s quite exciting because the Bath team tell me that no-one has really ever tried out this technology before, and so it’s quite fascinating to see some leading research being tried out in this structure in the exhibition, and thus allowing the public to gain an insight into this collaboration between Rural Studio and the University of Bath.
