AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE MACHINABILITY OF SEVERAL LOCAL WOOD SPECIES AND DATE PALM LEAVES' MIDRIBS

Abstract

Egypt relies on importation for the satisfaction of its needs in wood. With the increase of prices of wood this will represent a burden on Egypt's balance of payments. Thus, research should be directed to the use of local substitutes, i.e., local wood species or non-timber resources, such as date palm leaves' midribs (DPLM).

The use of local woods or non-timber resources is hindered by the lack of information about their properties. Machinability is one of the important wood properties, which has to be known to enable the suitable choice of wood working machine tools and machining variables, as well as the proper cutting tool materials.

Machinability criteria were investigated for many widely known wood species. Researchers concentrated on the effect of machining variables on machinability criteria.

The objective of the present work is to determine the machinability criteria and machinability data for some local wood species (Eucalyptus, and Casuarina), as well as date palm leaves' midribs as one of the non-timber locally available resources. For comparison, the wide-known Beech wood was included in research. Machinability criteria were determined in turning on a conventional center lathe in longitudinal and cross feed cutting directions. The cutting tool material was chosen to be high speed steel.

The test rig used consists of a three component tool force dynamometer, thermocouples embedded in cutting tools for cutting temperature measurement, four channels bridge amplifier, and computer, equipped with analog to digital converter. The dynamometer and the amplifier were designed and implemented specially for this study. The whole system was