Understanding Wood, by R. Bruce Hoadley. I had this sitting in my Amazon wish list for about a year as I grew my commitment to actually reading the thing entirely.
It’s not a picture book. It’s more like a text book, with charts and tables and formulas and diagrams. But it is so INTERESTING!
It starts with the botanical nature of cell structure and growth. The fundamentals that inform the basic behaviors of wood that we all recognize …
… like warping, cracking, splitting …
… strength and weakness in various orientations …
And it explains the beauty of wood, of grain patterns and figure, like bird’s eye, striping and quilting.
And other fundamentals, like, how does wood hold a nail?
And lots of tables and charts to use as reference later.
The author encourages you to print these charts out and hang them on the wall of your shop, to keep in mind these fundamentals as you design and build. And now that I got my printer working again, I’m going to do just that!
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