About JankaHardnessScale.com
JankaHardnessScale.com is a free wood hardness reference built and published by Ready Utilities. It's a one-purpose site. Everything here is organized around a single interactive Janka hardness comparison that lets people look up wood species, compare them side by side, and figure out which ones actually hold up for their project.
What This Site Does
The interactive Janka hardness tool is the main event. Visitors can search for any wood species, sort by hardness, and run direct comparisons without hunting through a printed chart. There's also a full species chart and a plain-language breakdown of what the Janka scale actually is, how the test works, and what those lbf numbers mean for real flooring decisions.
Site owners can also grab a free embeddable widget and drop the comparison tool directly onto their own pages. Their readers get something useful, and the embed includes an attribution link back here.
Who It Is For
Most people landing here are choosing hardwood floors. Janka hardness is genuinely one of the more useful specs for that decision. It indicates how much punishment a floor can take before it starts showing damage. The table below gives the rough thresholds most North American flooring guides use. Red oak, at around 1,290 lbf, is the standard benchmark that everything else gets measured against.
| Hardness Range | Typical Application |
|---|---|
| Above 1,500 lbf | High-traffic areas (entryways, kitchens, commercial spaces) |
| 1,000 to 1,500 lbf | Typical residential rooms (living rooms, bedrooms, hallways) |
| Below 1,000 lbf | Low-traffic or decorative applications |
Woodworkers make up the other main audience. When a project calls for a species with a specific durability or feel, comparing a few options side by side beats flipping through a book. The tool makes that faster.
How the Data Is Sourced
Hardness values here come from two main published sources: The Wood Database (wood-database.com) and the USDA Forest Products Laboratory Wood Handbook. Where those two differ, the values presented represent commonly cited averages.
The Janka test works by pressing a steel ball 0.444 inches (11.28 mm) across halfway into a wood sample, to a depth of 0.222 inches (5.64 mm). According to the Wikipedia entry for the Janka hardness test, that exact ball diameter was chosen so the contact circle covers precisely 100 square millimeters, or one square centimeter. The method is standardized under ASTM D143 for clear timber specimens; flooring testing typically references ASTM D1037. All standard samples are conditioned to 12 percent moisture content, cut from clear heartwood, and free of knots.
Gabriel Janka developed the test in 1906. He was an Austrian-born American researcher (1864 to 1932) who adapted the Brinell hardness test already used for metals. In the US, results are in pounds-force (lbf). Sweden reports in kilograms-force (kgf), and Australian standards use either newtons (N) or kilonewtons (kN).
A note on accuracy: Published Janka values are averages. Every species has a spread of test results, but most published tables only show the middle number. No testing happens on finished flooring. Use these figures as a comparison guide, not as a guarantee that any specific board or installation will perform exactly that way.
About Ready Utilities
Ready Utilities makes free, practical tools for everyday tasks. This site is one of them. It's narrowly focused on wood hardness data, which is exactly what makes it useful. More about the person behind it is on the author page. Questions about the site or its data go to the contact page.