Species

Fit — out of ten, against Hando’s brief: harder woods preferred, smooth or near-smooth, easy on irons, holds a crisp arris. Movement counts for very little, since this is indoor furniture in stable conditions. It is a judgement, not a measurement — the raw columns are there so you can disagree with me.

Because Fit is scored against furniture, the carving and treen woods land low and shouldn't. Lime, juniper and boxwood are the right answer for what they are for; read their Good for line rather than their number.

Janka — force in newtons to press a steel ball half its diameter into the side grain.

Work — one bar fights you, five is a pleasure: how cleanly it shears under a plane and chisel.

Tear-out — how readily fibres lift and break out ahead of a hand plane, with more bars meaning more trouble. It is scored on a typical straight-grained board with a sharp iron and the chipbreaker set close, so it measures the species, not the board. Any figured board — curl, ribbon, birdseye, a twist around a knot — pushes towards five whatever the species. Work is the broader judgement of what cutting feels like, effort and resistance and fuzz included; Tear-out is only the one question of whether the surface comes away torn. They disagree usefully: hornbeam and lignum vitae are hard going and also tear, while beech is hard going yet tears only moderately. The causes are almost entirely structural, so it follows the Grain column closely — the interlocked woods, sapele, khaya, iroko, merbau, elm and jatoba, sit at four and five because the grain reverses every few millimetres. When it happens, the order of remedies is: close the chipbreaker further, plane in the other direction, then the bevel-up smoother with a 50° bevel, then the scraper.

Surface — the pore texture a sharp iron leaves, from ring-porous and open through to glassy and poreless.

Tone — the settled colour of the wood after a year or two indoors, not the colour of a fresh-cut board. Sort it once for lightest first, again for darkest. The chip is the aged tone; how each species gets there, and which direction it travels, is in the Colour over time note inside the row. Two that will surprise you if you sort by this: walnut sits dark but lightens with age, while cherry sits mid-brown having started pink.

Density — kilograms per cubic metre at 12% moisture, the usual reference condition. It tracks Janka loosely but not exactly: pear and hornbeam are harder than their weight suggests because the texture is so fine, while merbau is heavy without being proportionally hard. Treat the figures as ±10%, since provenance and growth rate move them.

Grain and Rings are two different things, and they come apart. Grain is how easily you can read which way to plane, and whether you can judge it on a rough-sawn board at the yard. Rings is how visible the annual growth rings are. Ring-porous woods score five on both — oak and ash lay down a band of huge earlywood pores each spring, so the ring is unmistakable and the direction comes with it. The softwoods score high for the same reason, through hard and soft latewood contrast. Diffuse-porous woods scatter their pores evenly and have faint rings, which is why pear, boxwood and lime sit at one. But maple is diffuse-porous with faint rings and still reads clearly for direction, which is exactly the observation in your bench note — the two properties are independent, and for choosing stock it is Grain that matters.

The woods that fight you are the interlocked ones: sapele, khaya, iroko, merbau and meranti all score two on grain, because the direction reverses every few millimetres and no amount of looking will tell you.

Movement — tangential shrinkage, green to oven-dry. Lower is calmer. The T/R ratio in the notes matters just as much: above about 1.9 a board cups rather than simply getting narrower.

Joints — five holds a crisp arris and a clean dovetail socket; one crumbles, splinters or goes ragged at the corner.

Edge life — five is kind to irons, one sends you back to the stones. Minerals more than density: silica and calcium deposits blunt far faster than hardness alone predicts.

If you use Osmo — the per-species line assumes Polyx-Oil: clear for the woods that should darken, Raw 3044 for the ones that should stay pale, since a trace of white pigment there cancels the permanent wet-look a clear oil leaves. Two things apply to all of them. Osmo is formulated for sanded wood, so a planed or scraped surface takes far less than the tin suggests — go thin, work it in, buff off whatever hasn't gone in. And you cannot lay a shellac washcoat underneath it, so on the blotch-prone woods it is test-on-an-offcut and commit. Allow 24 hours between coats and around a fortnight before the surface goes into real use.

Hando’s notes from the bench — what Hando has found working the wood himself, kept apart from the researched text so it stays clear which is which.

My notes — the last section in every open row is for your own notes: what you found when you worked the wood, what a board cost, which tree it came off. It saves as you type, but only in this browser on this device. Nobody else sees it, and it does not follow you to another phone or computer. A dot beside a species name means you have written something there, and My notes in the bar narrows the table to just those.

Burn — how readily the wood scorches under powered cutters, with more bars meaning more easily. There is no standard index for this the way Janka exists for hardness, so this is built from the three things that actually cause it: density, a closed fine texture that gives chips nowhere to go, and resin or sugar content that softens and chars under heat. The scoring matches what woodworkers consistently report, where cherry, maple and purpleheart come up again and again.

Two caveats on reading it. The score is the tendency to scorch, not how visible the scorch is — pale woods show it cruelly, so sort by Tone alongside it: a burn on maple or hornbeam means scraping back, while the same mark on walnut or wenge largely disappears. And softwoods score low on the wood itself, yet pine burns through a different route, by depositing pitch on the blade until friction does the work. Clean the blade rather than blaming the board.

A solid edge means the species is on the current mass.ee stock sheet. A dotted edge means you source it elsewhere: Estonian sawmills for maple, lime and European cherry, orchard clearances for plum and sour cherry, hedgerows and thinnings for rowan and juniper, a specialist for boxwood and lignum vitae, and apple as your reference point.

Left out as likely eye-watering: teak, Macassar ebony, zebrano, Santos rosewood, bocote and Brazilian lacewood. Shrinkage figures vary between sources by a point or so, so treat them as a ranking rather than gospel.