In wood preservation there are two classical ways for assessing the reliability of preventive treatments against wood decay: the laboratory tests in which the various parameters are evaluated independently and the field tests or service tests in which those parameters are acting together in the natural environment. One has always tried to build bridges between the two types of experiments and to establish correlations between their results, but a rather large gap is still persisting. The aim of the research which is reported was to develop a method for testing directly the preventive action against basidiomycetes decay when the treatments do not lead to a full impregnation of the wood, but only raise a barrier of limited depth. A method has been developed, testing the wood specimens (of various sizes and shapes for representing various types of end-uses) out of test vessels, i.e. in non sterile conditions, but with well checked pure cultures. The various steps of the research are exposed and the results so far obtained allow to expect some interesting possibilities of testing directly, rapidly and accurately the resistance of any wood product, in its ready to use form, to decay by basidiomycetes.

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