A friend of mine sent me an email that had the following picture about identifying wood attached to it. I of course thought it was very funny and had to share it here. However it also got me to thinking about a real problem that I have and I would guess others do as well. Every time I make something out in my shop and I get the finish on it, to really enhance the woods natural beauty I take it to someone to show them my work.
I never have made any money from my shop so the only payment I get is when someone oohes and aahes over something I have made. Regardless of who I show it to I always seem to get the same two comments. First I get something along the lines of “that is really nice” or “this is beautiful” or some variation of that. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that everything that comes out of my shop is really nice. What I am saying is that if something I have made is not nice, I just don’t show it to people.
Sometimes others see my poor work by accident, like last summer when I was spending a lot of time camping with a friend on weekends and he asked me why the firewood I brought from home was always some strange shape or looked like a half finished project….. You see whenever a beautiful vase went haywire on the lathe or some wooden box did not cooperate with my table saw I would just add it to the burn pile. And that burn pile sometimes ends up on a camping trip with me. Next summer I have remember to keep my firewood in two different piles, private and public, private for burning in the shop on a cold winter day (when no one is looking) and public stuff I grab on my way out camping. That way even my camping buddies will think I am a better woodworker than I really am.
The second comment I almost always get right after “this is beautiful” is “what kind of wood is it?” and I must admit in the past I seldom knew the answer to that question. I guess when you are young or first start working with wood you never really think about what kind of wood you are working with. I know that I was more worried about “project” what I was working on and never really thought about what it would look like after I was done. As I have spent more time in the shop I began to understand the importance of what kind of wood I was using. Besides the look and feel of projects the quality of any project is changed by what kind of wood you decide to use. The number things that change a project just by the type of wood you select is higher than most of us even realize. Cost, look, durability, fit and finish etc. are all impacted by wood selection.
Now days I take special care to know and document the type of wood I chose for each project that I work on so that I can answer the important second question “What kind of wood is this?” . Obviously the book I showed earlier is a spoof off the real book by Bruce Hoadley titled “Identifying wood”, the book has great reviews. And it is reasonable priced as well. I don’t own this book yet because honestly it seems like it may be more information that I need but it is on my wish list anyway.
The book I use and really like it the The Real Wood Bible: The Complete Illustrated Guide to Choosing and Using 100 Decorative Woods
Good luck in the shop and remember to keep that funny firewood hidden until no one is around.
