Commonly-used penetration test procedures for timber treated with borate or organotin wood preservatives demand preliminary oven-drying before application of the spot-testing reagent(s), in order to achieve reliable results. The delay of 12 hours or more during oven drying is often a nuisance. Modifications to the spot-testing procedures, involving alternative solvents and acidification conditions, have allowed the preliminary oven-drying step to be replaced by a very short heating period after application of the reagents, reducing the total testing time to a few minutes. Reliability of the modified procedures has been determined for several timber treatments, over a range of treated timber conditions, and sensitivities of the modified procedures have been determined by chemical analysis of spot-tested material.

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