How to Make Your Own Furniture
Wood Selection.
The identification and selection of woods for use in the cabinet shop is not a subject that can easily be learned from books.
Colored illustrations would help, but you need to become acquainted with woods by actually handling them, and having someone, expert on the subject, identify them for you.
Frequent visits to the furniture-wood dealers is a great help in this respect because you can see the different varieties side by side ard know exactly what you are looking at. Here we shall have to be content with brief descriptions.
It does help to have on hand a reliable book on woods for reference, or even a dealer's illustrated catalog. One reason is that many of the furniture woods have several names and even local appellations.
There are about fifty kinds of wood called mahogany, and even four or five known as white-wood. An outstanding example of confused nomenclature is Douglas fir which is known as Oregon pine and is neither fir nor pine but a species all its own.
Continued....
From "How to Make Your Own Furniture"
By: Henry Lionel Williams
Leave a comment | View Comments
