Wood Facts

[JRowan]

I have been thinking of including a little history on the wood that I make pens from. Is there a site somewhere that would show a little bit of info? I know about the Pennstate library site, but it only shows 12 woods total, and only 2 that I have used. The info on these downloadable cards is what I am after. Any ideas on where I might be able to find this kind of info for woods that aren't listed on the Penn State site?

TIA

John

 

[jimr]

My suggestion is go to a search engine, like google, type in the name of the wood you want. You will probably get a zillion hits, most of which will be useless. However, you will probably get a bunch that will give some useful information. I have done this a lot and after wading through lots useless crap I have come up with some very interesting information on many wood species

 

[Daniel]

I use this sight
http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/taxgenform.pl
I just type in hte name in the Common name box then click submit query.
if the page that comes up does not give you any good ideas to write click on the google link at the very bottom of the page. it brings up all sorts of info. usually with something that is more background rather than taxonomy.

 

[low_48]

John,
I just put my first pens in a gallery last week. This is the card I put on each of the corn cob pens. I put similar text on the other cards, and put on statements like; "The discoloration of this maple was caused by a lightning strike", or "The color red in this box elder is caused by disease and is only present in the box elder species". The gallery manager encourged this and explained how it helped sales.

Rich

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[Fred in NC]

I like it very much, Rich! Thank you for posting it.

 

[RussFairfield]

There are useful wood profiles on the Wood Magazine site.

http://www.woodmagazine.com/wood/category.jhtml?categoryid=/templatedata/wood/category/data/Wood_Magazine_Wood_Profiles.xml

 

[bnosie]

Here's a site that sells wood, but they have a lot of useful info about the woods they sell:

http://www.woodworkerssource.net/Wood_Products/wood_products.html

Choose a region, and then the species on the left. I make 2 1/2" x 1" wood ID cards from the info here.

 

[penhead]

Don't believe anyone has mentioned this site yet:

http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/



JohnPayton

 

[thostorey]

Look here and click on the 'wood' link.

http://windsorplywood.com/index.html

 

[JRowan]

WOW, thanks for all the sites. That makes for some interesting reading. I really liked the one that Russ mentioned. Has a little bit of history with it.