Oak ranks as one of the favorite wood types, especially for the people who are into the wood industry. Majorly, it’s because oak depicts a larger degree of strength and durability.
However, the conflict arises when we look around the gazillion sorts of wood and ponder if there’s any staunch replacement to oak.
This can be quite puzzling both for the professionals and habitual artists alike, so we’ve sought out some common woods that are stronger and carry far better reliability than oak. They may not even cost as much as oak but can bring an unprecedented positive result to your work.
With no further delay, let’s get started:
Hard vs. softwood
First, let’s start this discussion by breaking a stereotype. What happens is that when you are new to the woodcraft, you might think that the harder is the wood, the greater would be its strength.
Let us tell you, it doesn’t always work like that. There are woods like Curupay that are usually considered harder than oak, but they are so porous that the vulnerability factor increases. Such sorts of woods aren’t a great choice when you live in a humid area and want to invest your time and money in long-lasting wooden art.
Maple vs. Oak
We know you might have seen this coming. It is inevitable to compare oak with maple when we are looking for the latter’s potential rivals. Yes, Maple can be a good rival when one’s out to find a harder wood type, but this can be a bit mind-boggling when you further come across the sub-categories of each wood.
Let us simplify it for you, in Maple, there are two types, hard and soft maple while oak comes in white and red one. To replace the red oak, the hardest type, you can opt for the hard maple that depicts the same level of strength and longevity. The key difference between the both is that oak is always more porous while maple has a quite smoother surface.
Sticking power and price range
The reason to highlight these two factors at the same place is that they both are inversely proportional to each other. For instance, in the maple vs. oak scenario, maple gives a hard time when it comes to absorbing the glue layer as it is less porous.
On the contrary, the red oak is so porous that it efficiently pairs with any glue type and shows a higher acceptance. However, the price range tells a different side of what common wood is harder than oak concern since the red oak costs more while you can find the best of maple within the 7 to 11 dollar range per square foot.
This is what makes the maple stand out even in the oak market, while its resilient nature and greater room for innovative designing predict satisfactory outcomes.
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of our discussion, the crux of all the conversation is that maple can be a potential choice to rely on, as it has an equivalent degree of strength and hardness and may replace oak completely in the future ahead.
Lastly, we may expect that there might come new techniques that would sort out the lesser porous nature of maple to give it a complete edge over the others.