To assist the Alberta forest industry in making accurate surveys of decay leels in aspen stands, FERIC developed an advanced prototype of a wood hardness tester. Based on the penetration depth of a spring-loaded needle into fresh of frozen wood, the hardness tester can used to identify two levels of decayed fibre. FERIC's 1994 prototype of a wood hardness tester builds on a prototype hardness gun, or H-Gun, developed by the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in 1990. The FERIC wood hardness tester is light-weight, durable, and easily manufactured: in field tests, data acquisition was six to eight times faster than with the H-Gun. This prototype development was funded by the Northern Forestry Centre of Forestry Canada through the Canada-Alberta Partnership Agreement in Forestry (PAIF).