>No Ron N, I am not too enthusiastic about Delignit. I realise there >are folks out there who speak highly of it, but I just don't care for >it. I don't see why we need to smash up the fibres of good wood, only >to glue it all back together again. It sort of ends up like the thin >lamination Baldwin blocks - with a little too much glue I suspect. >We're using planks made from 3 mm thick laminations of solid maple. While my opinion that Delignit is miles from being as unusable as the Baldwin or Falconwood blocks, I agree it's still awfully dense. I rate it much closer to the edge of usability, than as an ideal block. An alternative supply house sample I have here is 13 plies of rotary cut maple in 38mm, which is pretty close to the 3mm you indicated. For most uses these blocks are just fine, and a whole lot nicer to work with than the dense stuff, but I've seen them fail in less than five years under abusively poor climate control conditions (schools). That's with 2/0 pins driven into a 0.25" hole, as was done at the time. I find that Delignit torque levels don't suffer as badly in similar wretched environments, so I continue to use it. I've often wished for a slightly more friendly alternative to Delignit without having to go to the 13 ply stuff. I've thought that something in the 2mm range might do the trick, but I'm not prepared to make my own blocks just yet to try it. And if I do like it, I'll be doomed to making them forever. Oh well, I could use the same press and stock to make bridge capping material too, I suppose. Maybe it's not as impractical as I think. Or maybe it is. Where do you get your blocks? Ron N
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