Lignum vitae wood can also be used to brew a tea. Other names for lignum vitae include palo santo (Spanish for "holy wood") Aura palo santo and "bastard greenheart" (not to be confused with true greenheart "Chlorocardium rodiei", a popular wood in shipbuilding, cabinetry, and woodturning but a completely different timber). Lignum vitae is also one of the numerous hard, dense woods loosely referred to as "ironwood". Lignum vitae is hard and durable, and is also the densest wood traded (density: 1.23 g/cm); it will easily sink in water. On the Janka Scale of Hardness, which measures hardness of woods, lignum vitae
Hardness main types of hardness measurements: "scratch", "indentation", and "rebound". Within each of these classes of measurement there are individual measurement scales. For practical reasons conversion tables are used to convert between one scale and another. Scratch hardness is the measure of how resistant a sample is to fracture or permanent plastic deformation due to friction from a sharp object. The principle is that an object made of a harder material will scratch an object made of a softer material. When testing coatings, scratch hardness refers to the force necessary to cut through the film to the substrate. The most common