Hi Phil. Take a nice piece of soft wood and drop a 100 gram steel ball on it from say a 2 feet height. Measure very carefully the depth of the indentation. Then repeat exactly the same drop in the same exact place. Remeasure the depth. It most certainly wont be even half the increase in depth as the first drop was. What the actual figures are for any given type of wood I have no idea. But the principle in this case is what is important. Cheers RicB Phil writes: Another factor, of course, would be the wood getting stronger as it is indented (work hardens, so to speak) - the phenomenon described by Ric B. I've never seen any data describing this phenomenon.
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