Wood species picker

Say what you are making and what matters to you, and see 440 woods ranked for it: hardness, weight, how much the wood moves, heartwood color, and, outdoors, decay resistance. 133 come from the USDA Wood Handbook and 307 from the Forest Products Laboratory's Tropical Timbers of the World, each figure with its table or page beside it. Price isn't part of the ranking.

How the ranking works

For each thing you ask about, every wood that fits is placed by where it stands among the others: the hardest of them scores 1 for "harder", the softest 0, and the rest in between by their order. "Most important" counts twice. When you pick a use, a wood the Handbook or its tropical sheet lists for that use scores one more point than one it doesn't. The scores are averaged and the woods sorted. That weighting is our rule, not a published figure, so each result shows the figures themselves, and you can judge from them.

A wood missing a figure you asked about is set aside and listed with the reason, never given a guessed value. A figure is only compared with figures taken at the same moisture condition, so a wood whose only figure is at another condition is set aside too: two imported woods whose dry figures the Handbook prints at 15% moisture content aren't ranked on hardness, and a tropical sheet that gives Janka hardness for "dry" wood without its moisture content isn't ranked on hardness either.

Where each figure comes from

Hardness is the Janka side hardness at 12% moisture content, from Tables 5-3b (US woods) and 5-5b (imported woods), or from a tropical wood's sheet when the sheet says its figure is at 12%. Weight is the basic specific gravity, oven-dry weight over green volume: both books print it, so every wood is weighed on the same basis. Stability is the tangential shrinkage from green to oven-dry, in Tables 4-3 and 4-4 or on the sheet: flatsawn boards move mostly across their width, tangentially, so less shrinkage there means less seasonal movement. Shrinkage a sheet gives only to 12% or 15% moisture content isn't compared. Where a sheet prints a range from several reports, the wood is ranked at the middle of it, and the range is shown.

Decay resistance is the Handbook's Table 14-1, which groups heartwood into very resistant, resistant, moderately resistant, and slightly or nonresistant. The Handbook says resistant heartwood generally gives satisfactory service above the ground and very resistant heartwood in contact with the ground (p. 14-6), so the outdoor uses rank only those classes. Where the table splits a wood by old growth and young growth, as for teak and redwood, both are shown. Woods the table does not list, such as red oak, are set aside for the outdoor uses instead of guessed.

Tropical Timbers of the World describes durability in words, on its own five ground-contact classes: very durable (more than 25 years), durable (15 to 25), moderately durable (10 to 15), nondurable (5 to 10) and perishable (under 5). We read each sheet's words into the Handbook's classes in the same order, perishable and nondurable together as slightly or nonresistant, and show the words we read. That reading is ours. A sheet whose reports vary by species or place, conflict, are hedged ("fairly durable"), or span more than two neighbouring classes isn't graded, and is set aside for the outdoor uses.

Color families are our grouping of the Handbook's own words for each heartwood, shown on every result, so a wood described as "light to dark reddish-brown" counts as both pink-to-red and brown. Sapwood is ignored unless the book says heartwood and sapwood look alike. For a tropical wood the family is read by rule from its sheet's heartwood words, which are shown; streaks and tints ("with a golden cast") don't set a family, and a sheet whose words name none, such as gray, is set aside when you pick a color.