Identifying Wood

Excellent book

Agreed. But as I recall, it didn't have a lot of colored pictures. Instead, it uses very detailed description of the cell structure, and how to identify wood by that.

So consider how you want to identify the wood. If you want to use photos as a primary method, the Hoadley book may not suit this style.

I saw another book that has samples of wood included. But it also lacked colored photos. And it only has a small number of samples.

Hi Kevin. Identifying Wood by R. Bruce Hoadley, is a wonderfull book. I use it all the time. It lets you identify wood by the structure of the wood itself. You will need a 10x magnifier at least. A low angle plane is also a great help. I would highly reccomend it to any wood worker. Gary

Kevin

The better books for wood identification are

The Woodbook by Taschen The National Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Trees

Both are excellent!

Ray

Yep, the Audobon book was another I was thinking of. Most of the wood I have now is Maple. I do realize there are several kinds. The best I've turned was what is called, at least in some places, hard maple. That is a lovely wood to work with. Now I also have a large amount of another type of Maple that is much softer. The bark is not smooth like a Norway Maple, and not the rough slabs I've senon the hard maple. I was wondering if the Hoadley book would have the info to allow me to distinguish twixt the three.

Thanks so much for the answers thus far.

-kevin

Kevin

The softer maple with the soother baerk sounds like Red maple or Silver maple - if it is Silver Maple, the bark will have a brighter brown coloring and the Red maple's bark will be more grayt than brown. If you have leaves the red maple has 3 points and a red stem teh silver has 5 very pronounced points with long fingers.

There are other types of maple - in the appalacians there are 2 other types - chalk maple and black bark maple that are softer - the chalk maple is very soft and the wood is almost white and tends to tear when cut. The black maple looks like the tree was in a fire and the wood is soft and white with a bit more character than the chalk maple - I guess you have to have all of the traits - bark, leaves and fruit to really be sure.'

Ray