The Wood Database
230 points by sinab 3 years ago | 35 comments- schmichael 3 years agoWish I could submit entries as I love using Western Juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) for yard projects like garden boxes and swingsets. Great option for folks in the Pacific Northwest. It's effectively an invasive species in its natural habitat though because of forest mismanagement! https://www.snwwood.com/channels/website/documents/restorati...
Update: found it! Submitting: https://www.wood-database.com/donating-wood-samples/
- Wistar 3 years agoJuniper is fantastic for raised beds. I usually get it at Dunn Lumber in the spring (Seattle area).
- galangalalgol 3 years agoare we talking about juniperous virginiana? Beautiful tree, horrible allergen. It does decemt at resisting insects amd rot. But if you want that bed to outlive you use osage orange. Rip it green though or you'll spend a fortune in blades.
- QuercusMax 3 years agoDifferent species - occidentalis (meaning Western) vs virginiana (from Virginia), on different sides of the continent.
- QuercusMax 3 years ago
- galangalalgol 3 years ago
- Wistar 3 years ago
- Jedd 3 years agoThis is an excellent resource.
I recently stumbled on an 'egg collection' for wood. This is almost literally what it sounds like - a huge collection of images of egg-shaped pieces of timber, that really shows off the colour and grain. A focus on Australian timbers, of course, but that's no bad thing as we're otherwise often poorly represented.
- augustk 3 years ago> This is an excellent resource.
...for people living in U.S., Myanmar and Liberia.
- Jedd 3 years agoAgreed that the parochial measurement system is frustrating - those filters could certainly benefit from an 'are you in the 95 percent?' toggle to flip to sane units.
FWIW the entries for each timber do have the metric (Pa, metre, etc) figures shown in parenthesis after the US imperial figures.
- Jedd 3 years ago
- steanne 3 years agooh, interesting. clown faces are registered by recording the patterns on ceramic eggs. i suppose it's a convenient size/shape for samples in general.
- pengaru 3 years agoBookmarked, thanks!
- augustk 3 years ago
- mjw_byrne 3 years agoWhilst randomly browsing on this site, I came across a piece of my own work! I made the chess piece pictured on the "kingwood" page.
I _think_ that's the first time I've ever completely randomly stumbled upon myself online, i.e. with no intention whatsoever of actually looking up something I'd done. Nice little boost to start the day with :-)
- osigurdson 3 years agoI suspect a lot of topic specific websites from the 90s just became wikipedia pages. However, there is evident value in highly curated content like this in a broad subject area that many people care about.
- wheels 3 years agoThis is my favorite practical tool for woodwork -- it tells you how much different woods will sag based on the properties of the load:
- hnlmorg 3 years agoEven though I don't suffer from trypophobia, I'm still finding the the Banksia Pod to be the stuff of nightmares.
- caramelcustard 3 years ago[insert the image of the front cover of the legendary "Identifying Wood: Accurate Results With Simple Tools (by R. Bruce Hoadley)"]
- ioseph 3 years agoSo great to see a well populated Australia section. We have lovely hardwoods but a lot of the popular woodwork reesources are very focused on European and American species. Thanks!
- rzarate 3 years agoI was expecting the link to take me to a landing page for a database implementation based on wood analogies.
- JeanMo 3 years agoSame. But i was not disappointed. The world has enough databases :D
- JeanMo 3 years ago
- metatranca 3 years agoQuick question probably not super related: do you know if something similar exists for floor tiles? I live in US and recently bought a house that has tiles from Italy, they look old but I love them and I would like to see if I can find them online(I already tried Lowes and similar).
- thadk 3 years agoI scraped the list of species from the main list page and put all of the woods into their phylogenetic tree: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/life (desktops only; use a preset list: wood-database.com; linear) or here's the PNG: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8uq8i5gyenp3t4x/wood-radial3.png?d...
Next step for someday is to replace phylotree.js with a D3 visualization on it which shows each image using the URL so you can see how the grains of the word relate according to the tree of trees.
- coolflower 3 years agoSuggest you an open source project that can use the picture of the wood to search for similar wood. https://milvus.io/
- born-jre 3 years agonitpick, website with footer and infinite scroll not good. :D
- xpe 3 years agoInterestingly, the creator is named Eric Meier -- not the same as Eric Meyer, known for his CSS expertise [1]
- bergenty 3 years agoDoes it have a footer? If they put all the footer information on the top I really like the setup on this site. Infinite scroll works really well in this situation?
- xpe 3 years agoI feel the same. There is a footer, but viewing it is quest that is always just out of reach.
- throwaway742 3 years agoInfinite scroll is never good.
- xpe 3 years ago
- Fiahil 3 years agoSeems to be an amazing resource, but so sad that it's tailored for an American audience with an English-only catalogue and those unreadable units (wtf is a lbs/ft3, seriously ?).
Edit: Ah ! They have meters and kg/m3 on each detail page, that's better !
- akiselev 3 years agoThe standard unit for purchasing lumber in the United States is a board-foot which is 1"x12"x12" or 1/12th of a cubic foot. Cubic feet is used because "board-foot" is too industry specific but it's still easy enough to convert when you need to calculate the weight of your woodworking/construction.
- akiselev 3 years ago
- vr46 3 years agoThis site literally represents everything I love about the Internet and makes me long for the early 1990s, when people would gather and curate information for its own sake and their own satisfaction.
I like Ian’s Shoelace Site too.
- eropple 3 years agoI use this site a ton to the point where I've bought both the hardcover and paperback versions of the book (hardcover now out of print due to COVID troubles). It's a fantastic resource for woodworkers.
- davidcuddeback 3 years agoDuckduckgo supports "!wood" for searching the wood database. Makes quick work if looking something up from the address bar.
- davidcuddeback 3 years ago
- smitty1e 3 years agoShout out to southwestern Oregon => https://www.wood-database.com/oregon-myrtle/
- wigster 3 years agothree 'different' alders seem to have the same image
- bythreads 3 years agoGreat ressource!
