Abstract

Finger jointing performance of thermally compressed (TC) oil palm wood was explored. TC_oil palm wood was manufactured from low (TC_LD) and medium (TC_MD) density wood, and the same type of wood samples were then finger jointed with two different finger orientations; vertical and horizontal fingers. During finger profiling, fracture of finger tips was found in TC_LD specimen, and the number of fractured fingers in the vertical finger specimen was higher. Finger jointed TC_MD had higher tensile strength than finger jointed TC_LD. Vertical finger gave higher tensile strength, and the strength increase was more pronounced in TC_MD specimen due to its finger was intact. However, the finger joint's strength was found to be relatively low compared with the tensile strength of solid specimens. The loss of tensile strength of TC_LD joint was larger than that of TC_MD joint due to the presence of fractured fingers in TC_LD occurred during finger profiling stage. Characteristic value of vertically profiled finger jointed TC_LD was found to be lower than that of horizontally profiled finger jointed TC_LD, which showed the opposite trend to that of the mean values, resulting from the presence of the larger number of fractured fingers in vertically profiled finger jointed TC_LD.