Performances and flexural bending behaviour of finger-jointed tropical timber analyzed by expperimental and numerical methods

The finger joints are commonly used to join the timber planks in order to make long span beam. This technique is widely used in the manufacturing of glued laminated timber (glulam). In the glulam beam, this joint form the weakest point. Therefore, the right profile of finger joint is needed to have optimum performance of glulam. Currently there is no standard for specific measurement of fingers profile in the glulam manufacturing for Malaysian hardwood timbers. As Malaysian glulam industry is still new, the choice of finger profiles is limited to available finger joint cutter which mostly for furniture industries and currently being adopted for glulam manufacturing. The finger profile has many parameters namely finger length, pitch, slope, tip thickness, butt depth and tip gap.