To state the obvious, trees don’t grow in nice straight lines. As natural creatures, they bend and sway in their environment — if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to withstand the extremes of weather. While this is great for the tree, once the tree has been cut down, the amount of useful wood that can be harvested is limited by many factors, including just how far from “straight” the trunk of the tree grew. Much of the wood that can’t be economically used for solid wood products ends up as chips, flakes, or fibres for manufactured “wood” products.
Bolefloors may increase the amount of solid wood that can be used for flooring:
Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.
Bolefloor scanners’ natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates “imperfections” such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.
H/T to BoingBoing for the link.
