Wooden it be nice?

[Piotrsko]

Weaving a fabric would lose the grain pattern unless you simulated one like an Irish sweater, or corduroy.

Vaguely recall someone "melting" wood fibers for printing them

[freebeard]

I was thinking it would be more like carbon fiber.

Hemp stalks don't have much of a grain.

[Piotrsko]

Have to trust you on that one, no experience with large overgrown pot plants except for a random hedge growing in Redondo Beach 55 years ago. That had decently large stems from what I recall. Walked by it going to school, didn't notice it until some actual hippies moved in next door and started stripping it. Could have been mugwumps but that would be splitting hairs.

[freebeard]

Same as with Bamboo. It's a stalk not a trunk, you might be able to press them together but not to get dimensional lumber.

Weaving the fiber would eliminate the anisotropy.

[Piotrsko]

Have seen bamboo "lumber" 2 x 4s replacements at the local orange or blue store. Looks like lightly stained semi prefinished wood. Don't know if it was structural or decorative or even rated for outdoors. Can't see why they couldn't engineer it appropriately.

[jakobnev]

It's all fun and games until you get ship worm on your land yacht.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Bamboo might be a good option, as it grows quite easily, and can be effectively cheaper to use as a plywood feedstock.

[kach22i]

What a horrible website, never tells you WTF it is.

I had to Google "What is MettleWood?"


2022
The Wood That Could—and Did—Receive a $20M Award
https://today.umd.edu/the-wood-that-...eive-20m-award

MettleWood product is made by removing lignin, a natural “glue” that holds the cells together, and extremely compressing the remaining wood to create a robust and rust-free structural material. Besides strength, another advantage of the product over conventional wood construction material is that many species can be used.

EDIT:

Watched the first 3 minutes of the 11 minute video, looks promising.

I gather this is a technology not an actual product I can go out and buy, correct?

I'll have to finish the video later, hoping to see some curved shapes, arches, circles and so forth.

I bet it's not easy to cut and drill.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Makes me wonder what would hold the cells together once the lignin is removed, and what could be done to re-use the lignin as an industrial feedstock.

[freebeard]

Wonder no more:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_wood

Densified wood
Densified wood can be made by using a mechanical hot press to compress wood fibers, sometimes in combination with chemical modification of the wood. These processes have been shown to increase the density by a factor of three.[23] This increase in density is expected to enhance the strength and stiffness of the wood by a proportional amount.[24] Studies published in 2018[25] combined chemical processes with traditional mechanical hot press methods. These chemical processes break down lignin and hemicellulose that are found naturally in the wood. Following dissolution, the cellulose strands that remain are mechanically hot compressed. Compared to the three-fold increase in strength observed from hot pressing alone, chemically processed wood has been shown to yield an 11-fold improvement. This extra strength comes from hydrogen bonds formed between the aligned cellulose nanofibers.

The lignin can be removed without compression. That's called white wood.

Delignified wood
Removing lignin from wood has several other applications, apart from providing structural advantages. Delignification alters the mechanical, thermal, optical, fluidic and ionic properties and functions of the natural wood and is an effective approach to regulating its thermal properties, as it removes the thermally conductive lignin component, while generating a large number of nanopores in the cell walls which help reduce temperature change. Delignified wood reflects most incident light and appears white in color.[27][28] White wood (also known as nanowood) has high reflection haze, as well as high emissivity in the infrared wavelengths. These two characteristics generate a passive radiative cooling effect, with an average cooling power of 53 W⋅m−2 over a 24-hour period,[28] meaning that this wood does not "absorb" heat and therefore only emits the heat embedded in it.[29] Moreover, white wood not only possesses a lower thermal conductivity than natural wood, and it has better thermal performance than most commercially available insulating materials.[27] The modification of the mesoporous structure of the wood is responsible for the changes in wood performance.