Best 1/4 wood to cut for Strength!

I’m looking to make some of the Door Hooks but i want them to be strong enough to keep from breaking.

Best 1/4 wood I can buy from Home Depot or Lowe’s? For HARDNESS

Plywood.

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Very vague recommendation lol

The description of what you are making is equally vague. What door hooks? What are you planning to hang from them? Towels? Small children?

Plywood is the strongest common wood-based material, but exactly what you would use depends what you want to do with it.

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Well seeing how I need it for the “hardness” it wouldn’t really matter if I’m hanging sharks or tissues. Asked for the best wood for HARDNESS. Plywood comes in many kinds. I just want the HARDEST ONE that comes in 1/4 and the GF can cut.

Use baltic birch plywood. More plies the better. Hardwood plywood all plies. Cut the parts and the strengthen them with Supper Thin CA glue or wood restorer.
Also 1/4"acrylic is very strong.

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Awesome thanks

Doesn’t matter how hard the wood, if the grain only goes one direction you risk breakage. Plywood has the grains running in different directions, and is inherently strong regardless of how “hard” the wood is.

If you want strength, get plywood. It really doesn’t matter what kind. If you want wood that’s hard, there are tables to look that up all over the Internet.

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Incidentally, take care with super-thin CA. That stuff will go absolutely [expletive] everywhere if you’re not careful. Although they say “water thin” I swear it’s actually thinner than water.

I mean, it’s super-handy for this sort of thing, but daaaang it likes to run, and it’ll run farther than you thought possible.

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Thanks for the info I appreciate it!

Hahaha! Noted!

Yes, super glues come in all viscosity including thinner than water.

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You don’t need hardness. You need durability. Hardness relates to brittleness, meaning it will break more easily. You want something that is durable. Plywood is your best bet, because its layers alternate grain direction and avoid the brittleness of a single layer of hardwood. What plywood you choose depends on your project and what you can get. Baltic birch is probably your best solution.

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Hard to tell. He was pretty adamant about wanting hardness. Strength is an entirely different thing.

Lots of hard woods (not to be confused with hardwoods). I was going to refer to the Janka scale comparisons out there but I couldn’t address the other part of the question - the hardest that the GF can cut. I know there are some folks who have done experiments with stuff like ironwood but I don’t have any details.

But if he really wants what he’s been asking for, here’s the Janka scale info anyway.

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HaHa last night I was quickly gluing together a project (which I hope to post )and one minute I was a free man, and next I realised that my project had got a hold of me. To the tune of about 1/4" square. I have learned that the greatest good should be the priority so I made sure the joint I was bonding was fully set and then spent 10 minutes slowly tearing my thumb off the part. The main idea is not to panic. If you go slow it will come loose.
It always amazes me how powerful CA is. I love it.

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Wood is a super interesting engineering material. It has some properties that can be compared to metal, and some properties completely unique to wood. Grain is one of these. Metals also can have grain properties, especially rolled products. But the strength of wood is dramatically lower across the grain than inline with it. Some woods are incredibly strong along the grain and can be equivalent to metal pound for pound. Aircraft spruce is one such material, and here is the neat part; wood does nor suffer from fatigue the way metal does.
In regard to having strength in two axes, plywood does an amazing job, but is still relatively weak between plies.
In the end, there is no one single ideal material. All materials have pros and cons, and the designer needs to select based on factors driving the design.

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