Choose the best wood for your project

so a couple weeks ago one of my viewers left me a comment and he said you know you need to do a video about how you pick which wood you're gonna use for which project cuz for those of us just starting out it's a total mystery how do you choose between maple and Purpleheart and cherry which wood is good for which thing do a video about that and I was like damn this is a really good idea I should do a video about that and then immediately I started second-guessing myself because I'm like Jesus this is an enormous topic and it's full of rules and there are exceptions to all of these rules and all sorts of crazy distinctions and it just sounds like a lot and I thought you know what I should just talk about me and my own personal experience as a craftsman because what else could I really talk about with any authority anyway so here is my painfully brief completely oversimplified guaranteed to get nitpick to death in the comments guide to picking woods for woodworking I know the title is not great I've got a guy working on that he's gonna come up with something very soon so I live in North America kind of right in the middle of North America actually and the city I live in Cleveland Ohio is one of the most heavily forested cities on the entire continent so I very rarely use imported or exotic woods because I have a big selection of high-quality affordable woods right here in my own mind I tend to separate woods into four categories soft woods easy working hardwoods tough and springy hardwoods and ultra hardwoods you won't find these categories in any book I just sort of made them up and I didn't even realize I was using them until I sat down to outline this video but I think they are a really good way of separating the different kinds of wood you might use for furniture making soft woods are conifers and they stay green all year round we're talking about pine spruce fir cedar trees like that and crucially these woods are soft now right this second there are a thousand angry wood nerds pulleys over their keyboards getting ready to tell me all the exceptions to this rule and how there are some soft woods that are harder than hardwoods and bla bla bla boys put a sock in it all the soft woods I'm gonna talk about are softer than all woods I'm gonna talk about and it's a generally good distinction so there's no reason for us to go confusing the beginners people usually associate soft woods with things like building construction because they're strong lightweight inexpensive and they don't typically think of them as furniture woods but I love to make furniture out of soft woods because it's strong lightweight and inexpensive and people have been making furniture out of soft woods for a really long time it's a great material for chair seats boxes blanket chests stuff like that and people like farmers or laborers made their furniture out of soft woods because well they could get it that's a great reason to use a wood if you can get your hands on it go ahead and make something out of it for instance I made this milking stool right here and I made the seat out of pine this is just some 2 by 6 material that I got from the Home Center and I'm super happy with the way it looks even though it's like 4 years old the wood was very easy to work I did it entirely with hand tools and it really wasn't difficult and then all these years later the wood still looks really pretty people often describe white pine is having a glowing quality to it it's kind of shiny I've got a couple coats of polyurethane and some furniture wax on here and that's protected the surface even though we use it as a chair and a step stool literally every day it's been very durable and it's held up great but wait a second didn't I just go on a whole thing about how soft woods are soft how am I gonna sit here and tell you that soft woods are also durable well it's actually a little bit complicated soft woods are soft because they're not very dense they're really good you know not falling over and not breaking because those are qualities that trees need to have and so they're excellent for housing construction they're also good for making some parts of furniture like seats but the softness of soft woods is really in the surface softness they're very easy to dent and ding so while you might see a table or a desk top made of pine sometimes it's rarely the top choice people usually make high wear services out of hardwoods like oak because they're gonna stand up to things like people's hands and jewelry and silverware getting knocked all over them all day long a pine top isn't gonna work as well for that but it works great for other things you could even build a dresser or a nightstand out of time that would work out just fine for making fine furniture I go directly to category number two my easy working hardwoods these are woods like cherry walnut soft maple and poplar and these are probably familiar names if you've done any amount of woodworking these woods are really popular for cabinetry and other fine furniture because they've got perfect characteristics their hardwoods but they're on the softer side and more importantly they're what's called diffuse porous woods that means the pores the veins that actually take nutrients around the tree are scattered evenly around the wood and the pores are very small that means the wood has a very even texture it leaves a fine finish and it's a homogenous material so no matter what you do to it it's really unlikely to splinter or chip like some harder woods are so with these easy working harder woods you can plane saw or and even use abrasive technologies like sanding and rasping and the wood is gonna give you a pretty good surface and good result almost no matter what most of these woods are pretty expensive but they've been popular for furniture work for a really long time because they fall right into this sweet spot where they're soft enough to be workable hard enough to be durable and very attractive a good example for instance is cherry I love working with Gerry and I think all woodworkers I know like working with cherry because it's very easy to work with and it leaves a beautiful result especially when you put some finish on it it just comes alive with a lovely sort of pinkish color walnut is another really common choice and seems like these days everybody loves it especially for those giant slab tables filled with liquid plastic or whatever and I think well that's great it's probably my favorite all-around wood because it's beautiful and it's easy to work it's a lot like cherry now up until pretty recently I didn't use soft maple and I had kind of never heard of it I'm from Connecticut where we have sugar maple and that yields wood called rock maple and it's called that for a reason it is extraordinarily hard but then I moved to Ohio and in Ohio we have silver maple trees and silver maple trees give you soft maple what's amazing about it is that it looks almost exactly like hard maple it has the same pale color and beautiful flowing grain and flame texture all that good stuff but it's so much easier to work than rock maple it's almost exactly like cherry so it's very easy to do stuff with and it even costs less so for a lot of places where I would have used rock maple before now I use soft maple I save a little money and everything looks the same the last one I want to talk about here is poplar and this is one that's not nearly as popular among woodworkers because it's kind of ugly honestly the wood can often be this very streaky color with green in it and some darker colors doesn't stain very well it's not particularly attractive but for a long time poplar has still been used a lot as what's called a secondary wood so if you were making a really fancy piece of furniture like a chest of drawers for a high-end client it would be really common to make all the outside in an expensive fancy looking wood like cherry but then all the inside parts would be made using a secondary would like poplar and the secondary wood has the same working characteristics as cherry it's easy to work and unlikely to splinter but it's much much cheaper and it's only gonna be in places where you're not gonna see it like the drawer components and the case work by using a primary wood that's expensive in fancy and a secondary would like poplar that's ugly but cheap you can make a really nice piece of furniture and not go out of business and what popular is very difficult to stain it's not very difficult to die and woodworkers have access to more and better dyes than we ever did in the past actually I just thought of something hold on a second this is a lap steel guitar that I made about ten years ago when I was pretty new to woodworking believe it or not this thing is made entirely out of poplar I used popular because I was living in Florida there wasn't a good lumberyard nearby and the big box store had plenty of poplar I knew that it was difficult to stain so I got some dye I got fiebing's leather dye which is still my absolute favorite for getting a black sort of urbanized look on wood but the great thing about dyeing poplar is that it takes the dye very evenly you get a dark rich color but the grain still shows through so by using dye instead of stain you can still get a really beautiful result even using an inexpensive and easy to work wood so we've covered our fancy cabinet woods but you might have a project where you need a wood to be not only harder but also tougher able to withstand a lot more mechanical strain for projects like this I recommend you go to our tuff springy hardwoods category number three not only are these woods harder and denser than our easy working cabinet woods they have a completely different internal structure these woods are diffuse porous open poured woods that means that all the pores in the wood are arranged in very clear distinct rings if you look at the end of a piece of diffuse porous wood those rings will jump right out at you and that structure makes these woods behave very differently for one thing they're much stronger and much more able to stand up to mechanical strain because they have these very long parallel strands of extremely tough fibers so for instance I've got a very thin piece of oak right here and even though it's tiny it is extremely hard to bend because it's very strong but it's also extremely tough which means that instead of breaking it flexes a little bit under strain and then returns to its original shape this is an extremely handy property for building as an example let's go back to the milking stool that I made I made the seat out of pine because it doesn't need to stand up to a huge amount of mechanical stress but these legs don't have any stretchers across pieces to reinforce them they're just led into the top with simple round tenants so all the mechanical force is right here I have to use an extremely strong wood and this red oak does the job beautifully I don't think I could pull these apart even if I use my maximum strength and these are fairly small pieces of wood wood like oak is really ideal for a situation like this where there's gonna be a lot of strain over and over again and the piece needs to be durable for years you also need to understand that diffuse porous woods work a little bit differently than our easy working cabinet woods or our soft woods they're very easy to work when you're going with the grain so when you're doing planing whittling working with a draw knife or even salmon you get a good result with not a lot of trouble the problem happens when you go cross grain that very tough stringy structure makes these woods susceptible to splintering so when you're sawing routing boring or turning you're much more likely to get chip out and big splinters to tear out chunks of the wood this isn't a deal breaker you can still use these woods to make all sorts of things but you have to get used to them if you're using machine tools make sure they're very sharp and experiment with different speeds people make great stuff out of these but it takes a little bit of extra care to figure out exactly how to handle them diffuse porous woods also split very easily that sounds like a bad thing but it's not most woodworkers don't think about splitting as being a process they want to use in the shop but it can be extremely efficient for instance if I have a board like this and I want to cut it in half rather than ripping it I might just split it in half and then quickly clean it up with a hand plan depending on the piece of wood I'm working on this might be much faster than sawing it might even be faster than using a power tool I can also use splitting to my advantage when I'm making furniture components so while I'm working on this tenon I'm definitely gonna saw it the shoulders but when I go to do the cheeks I could either saw them or just split them and then pare them down to size this is another place where using the woods tendency to split might be much quicker and more efficient these techniques won't work with woods like cherry and walnut because they don't split in straight predictable lines but oak ash and hickories split extremely easily and it's easy to look at the grain and just tell where the splits gonna go you can incorporate these techniques into your woodworking with just a little bit of practice these tough and springy hardwoods aren't necessarily the first choice for fine you're making but they are perfectly acceptable and you will see lots of pieces of wood especially made out of oak that's really popular in American furniture but ash works out really well too I made the doors of this humidor out of ash and I stained them to match the Spanish cedar of the case the client was very happy and using ash let me keep the cost pretty look you'll also see lots of things like desks and tables made out of oak the attractive grain and super-hard characteristics make it perfect for any surface that's going to get a lot of abuse now the one thing you do need to know about making fine furniture out of diffuse porous woods is those big open pores are going to show up on the surface of the wood and they're extremely deep if you think you're gonna fill those just by putting on a lot of finish you're probably going to be disappointed if you want a very smooth or glossy finish you're gonna need to fill those pores with something as an example I built this guitar out of swamp ash which is just a more open grained version of ash and I knew that the green was gonna have to be filled when I went to do the final finish so I made a mixture of drywall mud and black dye and I pushed that into the pores before I did the clear coat I died the wood red and so the entire effect is this beautiful red background with these very dramatic grain lines in black since I had the open grain structure to deal with anyway I decided to just use it as an advantage and try to make something that looked more dramatic in this case the open grain nature of the wood made it more fun to work with not less in my own work I sometimes need a wood that'll stand up to a lot of wear or friction or sometimes I just need something that looks unusual in these circumstances I go to my Ultra hardwoods for domestics that pretty much means rock maple it is an outstanding wood with beautiful grain very easy to die and finish in two lovely colors and it's just super super hard which makes it a little bit tough to work but you kind of figure it out over time and then this is where I sometimes incorporate some exotics into my work for instance I really love Purple Heart because it's you know purple and that color can make it sort of tacky and garish but if you use it tastefully and occasionally it can give your work that extra pump that really makes it stand out Purple Heart is also extremely ordinarily hard and dense wood and that can be useful sometimes I've used it for mechanical components when I make my own tools or my own machines because it can stand up to an incredible amount of wear and friction before it breaks down I also sometimes use eBay eBay is another imported hardwood that's extremely hard and tough I for instance turned this little Vaz out of IPE with a rim made out of maple and it just looks really nice it feels sturdy and solid as if it was made out of ceramic really and with an epoxy finish on it it also holds water and flowers so it functions as a vase it was very difficult to actually make it turn it on the lathe with carbide tools and it was still a challenge but it sits on my kitchen table and it stays there because everybody in my family really loves it so this is a case we're using IPE was worth the extra challenge because the final piece is durable and pretty so let's finish this up by looking at a single piece of furniture and the way I used multiple different woods to get the overall piece that I needed so this is a workout bench my wife needed it to do angled push-ups step up exercises jumping exercises and a bunch of other exercises that I totally don't understand she is in really good shape and she needed this bench to be a whole bunch of different things of course it needed to be strong and durable but it also needed to be lightweight so she could move it around quickly and not get bogged down during her workouts and it's gonna live in our living room which means that it has to blend in with the rest of our furniture because sometimes when we have company we pull this thing out for extra seating so it's got to kind of look like the rest of our stuff that's a lot of requirements for a single piece and I made all those things happen by combining five different Timbers in the one piece of furniture for the top of the bench I used Douglas fir it's a soft wood but it has an extremely high strength to weight ratio so even though it's very strong it's super light I can pick it up and move it around really easily and the top is very rigid even when I jump on top of this thing you can't see it flex or move at all I also used reclaimed Doug Fir because pretty much every old building in Cleveland has Douglas fir for its floor joists and ceiling rafters it's easy to buy this stuff and it's got a lot of great detail water stains interesting grain and little nail holes that make it look interesting without making it look like garbage when I went to make the legs I needed them to be really strong too but I still had to keep weight down so just like the milking stool I went with red oak it's extremely strong but it's not very dense so it didn't add much to the overall weight of the piece now red oak is kind of fragile and splintery because of its low density so here on the edges of the legs I routed in some champers if these met at sharp corners they'd be very likely to get dinged and splinter chamfering them makes that pretty much impossible and then for the chamfer I just used a simple 45 degree bit and that gave me very smooth entrance and exits and a very straight cut with no sharp lines or corners it was very unlikely that the tool was gonna cause the work to splinter when I went to do the feet of the bench they had to be wider than the top to keep the whole thing stable but because they stick out I knew they were likely to get kicked and knocked around a ton so I had to switch to a harder and denser wood I went with white oak on these it's actually a lot harder and denser than red oak and so it's been able to stand up to all the chaos of just being in the family room I also wanted to route in this little round over detail with a rabbit that's a sharp detail to put in the wood and a lot of stringy hardwoods would chip out when I'm doing this but white oak has a much smoother texture than other stringy hardwoods so it was able to take this detail with no trouble and then I also needed a piece of wood to act as the stretcher because when weight was applied to the middle of the bench I didn't want the legs to move out in this direction I could have used pretty much anything here because all that's doing is applying a little bit of tension but I also decided to attach the stretcher to the feet using a slightly fancy dovetail joint I was showing off a tiny bit but I wanted it to be subtle and not jump out at the viewer too much so I picked tulip wood it's a hardwood so it's gonna play nice with oak when they're joined together and it's got a similar color to oak but a very different green structure so if anybody cares to look they'll notice a nice little detail but it's not gonna jump out and overwhelm the viewer it's tasteful taste is a new thing I'm trying in the stuff that I make I'll tell you how it works out as a final detail and mortis the legs straight through the top with this round tenant that I turned on the lathe and then to lock it in place I slip that tenon and drove in a wedge made of walnut and I'm sure you're thinking oh does walnut make a good wedge material no not at all it's really much too soft and it breaks too easily but I love the way the dark walnut looks against the light-colored oak and Douglas fir so I pretty much always use walnut for my wedges I just make twice as many wedges as I think I'll need and I throw away the ones that break it's one of the few decisions I make purely for the way that it looks and I have no regrets so a video like this could never possibly cover everything about wood selection but I think what I did is actually cover everything that I really think about when it comes to wood selection because I do 99% of my work with six or eight common locally sourced species and I kind of recommend that you do that to get to know half-a-dozen readily available inexpensive woods and try to make everything you can out of those woods instead of introducing a new wood with each project that you do every time you bring in a new wood there are new challenges and new things that you have to learn and that's only gonna slow you down if you find this topic interesting I also highly recommend this book with the grain a craftsmen's guide to wood by Christian Beck support it is by far my favorite book on the topic of wood characteristics and wood behavior it covers a ton of North American species I literally look at this book at least once a week and I can't say that about any other woodworking book that I own and if you enjoyed this video you might want to become a supporter because these videos are brought to you by my patrons on patreon if you're interested in supporting educational DIY videos like this come on over to patreon comm / 4x Krueger and check out the early access exclusive content and rewards that I have only for my patrons before I go I want to give a quick shout out to my colleague Neil McKinley he's a Scottish woodworker who made woodworking YouTube videos for a really long time and recently he sort of stopped doing that and started a podcast which is totally not about woodworking it's just about him and talking to people and politics and current events and funny humorous stuff I don't know it's hard to explain but he's a hilarious guy I really love what he does and I think more people should listen to his podcast it is totally for grown-ups there's a lot of cursing and stuff but if you like that sort of thing I will drop a link in the description he needs more listeners so go check that out and to everybody who's watching this video thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 135,390

Rating: 4.9605427 out of 5

Keywords: wood, hard wood, soft wood, furniture, furniture making, handtool woodworking, cherry, ask, oak, pine, maple, plane, sand, ash, beginner, education, diy, shop, lumber, lumber yard, make, maker

Id: 2mWLJFlDB_4

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019