A Survey of Methods of Measuring the Smoothness of Wood

The purpose of this paper is to describe the various methods of measuring the surface smoothness of wood. The experimental studies made showed that refinements in the preparation of wood surfaces can be detected by several photographic procedures: the glassimeter, shadow test, light ribbon test, highlighting test, and photomicrographs. Two instruments used primarily in the metal industry were found useful for analyzing wood surfaces, the Forster instrument and the Talysurf instrument. Surface profiles of great precision were obtained with these instruments in which minute ridges in a wood surface as fine as those resulting from finished sanding were magnified a thousand times. These instruments were used to compare wood surfaces refined by planing, sanding, and microsealing. In most cases, the microsealing process produced a smoother surface by flattening out the ridges.

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