Patent ID: 7286956

Claim:
A method for determining crook potential of a wood product, the method comprising the steps of: dividing the wood product into sections; dividing the sections into shrinkage coupons; obtaining a second derivative of a crook profile for each section of the wood product, where each second derivative is a function of the shrinkage values of the shrinkage coupons within the corresponding section: C″=f(T1, T2, T3, . . . , Tn) wherein C″ is the second defivative of the crook profile for each section of the wood product T values are the coupon shrinkage values for the n coupons into which the section is divided, and are determined by the product of a corresponding shrinkage rate coefficient (S) and a moisture content change (MC): Ti=Si.times.MCi; and integrating C″ twice to determine the crook profile of each section of the wood product.