from Hacker News

The Wood Database

by sinab on 6/28/22, 7:49 PM with 35 comments

• by schmichael on 6/28/22, 10:04 PM

  Wish I could submit entries as I love using Western Juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) for yard projects like garden boxes and swingsets. Great option for folks in the Pacific Northwest. It's effectively an invasive species in its natural habitat though because of forest mismanagement! https://www.snwwood.com/channels/website/documents/restorati...

  Update: found it! Submitting: https://www.wood-database.com/donating-wood-samples/

• by Jedd on 6/29/22, 12:58 AM

  This is an excellent resource.

  I recently stumbled on an 'egg collection' for wood. This is almost literally what it sounds like - a huge collection of images of egg-shaped pieces of timber, that really shows off the colour and grain. A focus on Australian timbers, of course, but that's no bad thing as we're otherwise often poorly represented.

  https://ttit.id.au/eggpage/alleggs.htm

• by mjw_byrne on 6/29/22, 10:39 AM

  Whilst randomly browsing on this site, I came across a piece of my own work! I made the chess piece pictured on the "kingwood" page.

  I _think_ that's the first time I've ever completely randomly stumbled upon myself online, i.e. with no intention whatsoever of actually looking up something I'd done. Nice little boost to start the day with :-)

• by osigurdson on 6/29/22, 4:47 AM

  I suspect a lot of topic specific websites from the 90s just became wikipedia pages. However, there is evident value in highly curated content like this in a broad subject area that many people care about.

• by wheels on 6/29/22, 5:18 AM

  This is my favorite practical tool for woodwork -- it tells you how much different woods will sag based on the properties of the load:

  https://woodbin.com/calcs/sagulator/

• by hnlmorg on 6/28/22, 9:51 PM

  Even though I don't suffer from trypophobia, I'm still finding the the Banksia Pod to be the stuff of nightmares.

  https://www.wood-database.com/banksia-pod/

• by caramelcustard on 6/28/22, 10:21 PM

  [insert the image of the front cover of the legendary "Identifying Wood: Accurate Results With Simple Tools (by R. Bruce Hoadley)"]

• by ioseph on 6/28/22, 11:35 PM

  So great to see a well populated Australia section. We have lovely hardwoods but a lot of the popular woodwork reesources are very focused on European and American species. Thanks!

• by rzarate on 6/29/22, 9:11 AM

  I was expecting the link to take me to a landing page for a database implementation based on wood analogies.

• by metatranca on 6/29/22, 1:47 AM

  Quick question probably not super related: do you know if something similar exists for floor tiles? I live in US and recently bought a house that has tiles from Italy, they look old but I love them and I would like to see if I can find them online(I already tried Lowes and similar).

• by thadk on 6/29/22, 12:45 PM

  I scraped the list of species from the main list page and put all of the woods into their phylogenetic tree: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/life (desktops only; use a preset list: wood-database.com; linear) or here's the PNG: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8uq8i5gyenp3t4x/wood-radial3.png?d...

  Next step for someday is to replace phylotree.js with a D3 visualization on it which shows each image using the URL so you can see how the grains of the word relate according to the tree of trees.

• by coolflower on 6/29/22, 3:08 AM

  Suggest you an open source project that can use the picture of the wood to search for similar wood. https://milvus.io/

• by born-jre on 6/28/22, 10:28 PM

  nitpick, website with footer and infinite scroll not good. :D

• by Fiahil on 6/29/22, 9:56 AM

  Seems to be an amazing resource, but so sad that it's tailored for an American audience with an English-only catalogue and those unreadable units (wtf is a lbs/ft3, seriously ?).

  Edit: Ah ! They have meters and kg/m3 on each detail page, that's better !

• by vr46 on 6/29/22, 12:00 PM

  This site literally represents everything I love about the Internet and makes me long for the early 1990s, when people would gather and curate information for its own sake and their own satisfaction.

  I like Ian’s Shoelace Site too.

• by eropple on 6/29/22, 2:13 AM

  I use this site a ton to the point where I've bought both the hardcover and paperback versions of the book (hardcover now out of print due to COVID troubles). It's a fantastic resource for woodworkers.

• by smitty1e on 6/28/22, 9:27 PM

  Shout out to southwestern Oregon => https://www.wood-database.com/oregon-myrtle/

• by wigster on 6/29/22, 10:27 AM

  three 'different' alders seem to have the same image

• by bythreads on 6/28/22, 9:47 PM

  Great ressource!