About the Project

How my wood list grew into an online project

Eventually, I realized that all of the data that I found in most wood identification books available to the public was just too vague and limited. Concerning mechanical properties of the wood, many times it would read something like “moderately hard and heavy, with good strength properties . . .” But I was left wondering: how hard, how heavy, and how strong was this wood? What were they using as a standard, and how exactly did it measure up to other woods that I was used to using?

It wasn’t until I found a great resource called the Wood Handbook: Wood as an Engineering Material, produced by the USDA’s Forest Products Laboratory. (The book can be accessed on their site for free.) This helped introduce me to new terms and methods, such as Janka hardness testing, and modulus of elasticity, which gave an even clearer picture of the woods that I was working with. This manual, along with Tropical Timbers of the World by Martin Chudnoff (again being produced by Forest Products Laboratory: a division of the USDA), form the foundation and the bulk of the data used in this wood database.

With the addition of these new sources, along with a growing collection of wood books and other sources scattered across the internet, I was able to expand my original small wood list started back in 2007 into a much larger and more comprehensive collection. And so in December of 2008, I pulled out my flatbed scanner and officially launched “The Wood Database.” By getting high-resolution scans of woods whenever I had them available, as well as making a clean, easy-to-read user interface with informative links, I sought to take full advantage of the online medium. Being online, I could not only integrate my own experiences as I went, but I also chose the option to give readers a chance to add any further data they might have on a given wood species by allowing pictures and comments to be added for each wood profile.