phinds

WOWZERS !!! Great catch. I drool in your general direction.

@CoopThat looks more like ash than hickory/pecan but ash is quite hard/dense (American ash anyway). Can you send me a sample to evaluate?

zero possibility that this is any kind of maple http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/_anatomy/diffuse porous/maple/_maple.htm Off the cuff, it looks a bit like pecan/hickory but I'd need more information to tell. Can you show the face grain? What's the density?

Definitely my favorite as well

Picked up some really nice canary wood recently and here are a couple of candle holders turned from one piece of each plank. Finish so far is just a couple of applications of clear stain. Not sure what topcoat I'll use on them. Red streaked one, about 5" diameter yellow one, about 3.5" diameter

Good catch

Absolutely none of that on Wood Barter. Just friendly banter, good woodworking advice, and frequent drool-worth pics of wood plus the buying/selling and trading of wood. I tried both of the forums you mentioned, quite some time back, and quickly gave up on them both. I like this forum for sure but it's very light in terms of traffic and WB is much more heavily populated so I spend most of my time there.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Wood Barter. For me it's a like having a whole crew in the shop with me. WAY more posts than here and the same kind of camaraderie, plus a lot of buying and selling and trading of wood. I don't do facebook or twitter or any of the social media crap, but I spend a huge amount of time on Wood Barter (full disclosure, I moderate the wood identification forum). You guys should try it out. Woodtalkonline is a good forum but the traffic is too low to get people's attention.

Coop, just FYI, and you are probably already aware, African mahogany ranges from pretty bland and boring to gorgeous ribbon stripe. Here's one side of a dulcimer case I made a long time ago. The full set of pics is on my site.

The truncated rays in the second pic are a sure sign of reaction wood so you had that going against you in addition to it just being green. http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/_discussion_truncatedrays.htm

Coop, it's a pretty common wood and it's actually a cypress but most folks refer to it as a cedar and that's how I have it on my site. http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/cedar, alaskan yellow.htm but as for IDing a specific piece, no. A lot of softwoods all look pretty much the same in the end grain (pine does tend to have larger resin canals). All I can say is that your wood definitely could be Alaskan yellow cedar.

Saw this sitting on a shelf when I was looking for stuff for my grandson to play with. He loved it 'cause he could get his finger all the way into the smallest hole and I can't. Anyway, I've always thought of this as THE test run for when you first get your Forstner bits but it occurred to me that perhaps some folks hadn't ever seen one so I thought I'd put it up here just for grins. They do look pretty cool. My daughter asked me how I got the squares inside and it took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about but it DOES look like there are cubes inside cubes because of the way it's cut. I didn't make any attempt to clean this up (you can still see centering pencil marks) as it literally WAS just a test run for my Forstner bits way many years ago. They're easy to make, if a bit tedious. The only trick is keeping it centered for every cut. Each of the six faces all look exactly like the one shown straight-on.

Exactly. Here's my setup. Different height compartments make optimum use of space for various sized planks How my numbering system got so screwed up on the SketchUp layout I don't know. Just stupidity I guess.

I store a lot of my exotic planks vertically. No problems.

??? Seriously ???