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HOW TO PRESERVE WOOD FROM DECAY WHEN USED FOR BUILDING AND NAVAL PURPOSES.
SIR,—The House of Commons and the whole kingdom are ringing with indignation at the discovery that nearly abl the gun-boats built during the Crimean war, at such an enormous expense to the country, are rotten, and that the bolts which fasten the outside planks and timbers together are several inches too short. In a letter in the Times,
May 14, 1860, signed, "Forewarned and Fore-armed," the writer asserts that the condition of some of our reserve steam fleet is not much better than that of the Crimean gun-boats.
Admiral Seymour (see
Times, May 16, 1860) stated in the House of Commons,
" that the original sin of these vessels (Crimean gun-boats) appeared tobe the character of the timber of which some of them were built. It was well-known that not only in her Majesty's dockyards, but in the private building yards of the country, there was a lack of that properly seasoned timber which the undertaking of a large number of such boats would require."
If such be the nature of a great part of the timber used in our naval dockyards, unseasoned, and consequently liable to rot and decay, the Wooden Walls of old England will, therefore, be unfit to defend her in the hour of danger. It behoves the Admiralty to try every means to have the shipbuilding timber more carefully looked after and better seasoned.
With this view, the following method of pre-
paring timber for building purposes, introduced by the late Sir Charles G. Stuart Menteith, Bart., of Closeburn, on his estates, is now given.
He was in the constant practice of soaking his timber, after it was sawn into planks, in a pond of water, strongly impregnated with lime. In consequence of this soaking, the saccharine matter in the wood, in which the worm is believed to live, is either altogether changed or completely destroyed. Scotch fir wood, employed in roofing houses, and other in door work, treated in this manner, has stood in such situations forty years, sound, and without the vestige of a worm. In a very few years, fir timber so employed, without such preparation, would be eaten through and through. Besides freeing the wood from all attacks of the worm, it is found that the lime water steep in a great measure prevents dry rot, and makes the wood sounder and more durable for years.
