The Wood Explorer

The makers of The Wood Explorer bill it as the world's most complete and accurate electronic encyclopedia on wood. After checking it out, I'm inclined to agree... this baby is loaded with information! It contains detailed data on 1,650 wood species, acquired from over 1000 books, publications, and other sources. And, it has lots of photos, over 2000, including multiple shots of the same species to better depict the natural variations in grain and color.

The Wood Explorer comes in CD form and installs quickly and painlessly within minutes. Once installed, it presents a simple welcome screen containing a brief description of the main program options. Nothing fancy or pretentious here - always a good sign. The product provides several ways for retrieving information about wood species. You can search by common name, scientific name, or by specific criteria such as bending strength or hardness. You can also search by appearance using the photo guide. Chances are, one or more of these methods will enable you to quickly track down one or more species of interest.

The Photo Guide is a really nice feature for visually comparing woods. The initial screen contains thumbnail images of major color and grain groupings such as white, yellow plain, yellow with pronounced grain, tan-grey, light brown, dark brown, figured, and so forth. You then click on a major grouping to view thumbnail photos of similar species. So, if you selected the white grouping, you would see thumbnails for American holly, American hornbeam, Loblolly pine, Box elder, Yellow-poplar and, 26 other species. You then click on a species thumbnail to view a larger image along with scientific names, trade names, distribution, common uses, and other species data. Unfortunately, the scroll button for viewing common uses didn't always work for me.

The Compare tool is very useful once you figure it out. It allows you to compare woods in terms of bending strength, weight, side hardness, impact strength, crushing strength, stiffness, and toughness. Up to 150 species can be compared at a time using ratings such as soft, hard, low, medium, and high. If you click on a specific rating, the numerical value from which the rating is derived is displayed. You can also sort results by any of the above criteria.

The Criteria Search allows one to search on 50+ attributes including location, color, grain, weight, bending strength, hardness, decay resistance, stability in service, toxicity, and a bunch of different woodworking properties such as ease of cutting, turning, bending, gluing, and finishing. To use, you iteratively select properties from pull-down menus, each time narrowing down the list of candidate wood species that match your selected criteria. This proved to be a very powerful tool. It generally worked fine although once a particular value such as "Side harness - very hard" was selected, there seemed to be no easy way to replace it with a different one such as "Side hardness - soft", short of redoing the search from scratch. It also wasn't always clear if criteria that resulted in no matches were ignored for subsequent searches. It didn't help that the scroll-down button for viewing the search criteria didn't work.

For the most part, this product is very easy to use but there are a few gotchas, such as the behavior of the Criteria Search. When you do a common name search, you must remember to click the "Start New Search" button if you really do wish to start searching from scratch. Otherwise, it will attempt to refine your previous search giving you unexpected results. When doing a search based on wood properties, the scroll-down buttons for viewing the various search criteria didn't work. I also couldn't get the Go Web button to work. It's supposed to bring up the Wood Explorer Web site in a browser but that didn't happen for me. (My PC has both Microsoft Explorer ver 6.0 and Netscape ver 7.0 installed). Note that several windows are created as you use the various features of this product so it can get a bit confusing to keep track of things after awhile.

The creators of The Wood Explorer faced a daunting task in assembling the myriad sources of information for each species because there is rarely definitive data for any particular characteristic. For example, one source might rate the gluing properties of a wood as "easy" whereas another source might rate it as "difficult". Likewise, more quantitative properties such as side hardness may be reported differently from source to source. To partially resolve these types of inconsistencies, the Wood Explorer authors have provided multiple values for each wood property with confidence ratings assigned to each. Thus, for example, the heartwood color of pecan is listed as yellow, brown, orange, red, and grey but because there are more asterisks next to yellow and brown, it can be inferred that the heartwood color is generally yellow or brown more so than the other colors. This all makes a lot more sense if you see the program in action but the point is that the authors have done a commendable job of addressing a thorny issue.

The Wood Explorer companion web site is a great resource in itself. It provides a limited, but impressive, set of free wood information and screening tools for non-paying users. Paying customers get access to the whole ball of wax: all the material available on the CD as well as additional wood information submitted by other users. And users are actively encouraged to submit wood information so as to continually enhance the product. The web site also has discussion forums, species distribution maps, info about threatened species, and country-specific forestry data. Very nice...

So how does this product stack up to the competition, namely "Woods of the World"? Well, it certainly raises the bar. The Wood Explorer features 1,650 woods versus approximately 900 for WoW. It also has a lot more photos (2000 vs 600) and reference sources (1000 vs 120). I found the Wood Explorer to be less cumbersome to use. On the other hand, Woods of the World provides video clips, an innovative wood comparison utility, and a substitution tool that uses the properties from a given species to find comparable alternative species. Both are great reference tools and it's hard to go wrong with either one...