Micromechanics of non-embedded spruce wood: Novel polishing and indentation protocol

•New polishing protocol of spruce wood without embedding for nanoindentation protocol.•Novel evaluation procedure based on fitting 2D histograms with a linear combination of bi-variate lognormal probability density functions (PDFs).•Reduced modulus and hardness in non-embedded Norway spruce samples show a decrease of 12% and 26% respectively when compared to embedded Norway spruce specimens.