All of the wood ident sites that I've found on the net up to this point are merely big repositories of pictures and info, but with only a big page of links to each wood's page. Click on "Elm" and it takes you to a page with lots of info about elm. Click on "Beech", and you get all you ever wanted to know about beech.
But what if you don't know WHAT you've got? What if you're trying to "identify" the wood?
Well, the only resource I have that comes close to that is a book called "What Wood is That?". It's the only one I know of that lets you look at the properties of what you're trying to identify and then look in the book for some clues as to what it is.
What color is it, white, yellow, grey, brown? Is it two colors or one? What's the second color? How distinct are the rings? Are the medulary rays well-defined or not-so? Are the pores visible at all? If not, are they in rings, or diffuse throughout the sample?
The only problem with this book, however, is that you have to do a lot of flipping around to check each property of the wood... and you need a piece of paper to keep track of all of the woods as you rule some out with each next property of your mystery wood.
What's really needed is an online database where you could enter in all of the info about the rays, the pores, the rings, the colors, etc. and then the database would find the likely suspects for you.
I can create something like this myself... but, before I do, I figure I should ask: Does anybody know of something like this already out there?
- Joe