Mahogany: This reddish-brown timber with a straight grain is a very important timber for furniture, cabinet making and high-quality joinery. It is most often used for staircases, banisters, handrails and panelling, as well as for floors. Mahogany is an easy wood to work with and it nails, screws and glues well. While care is needed if you want to stain mahogany, it will varnish and polish well.
Beech: This timber is pale cream to pinkish-brown but is often 'weathered' to a deep reddish-bronze colour after steaming. It is the most popular general purpose timber, used for furniture, flooring, interior and, when treated, exterior joinery. When rotary cut, beech is also used as utility plywood and it can be sliced to provide decorative veneers.
Douglas Fir: This is a softwood with a high bending, medium resistance to shock loads and a very poor steam bending rating. Douglas Fir can be worked with ease using hand or power tools, but it does tend to blunt cutters. This light reddish-brown timber is the world's most important source of plywood, while the large solid baulks are used in heavy construction work.
European Whitewood (Spruce): The colour of spruce varies from almost white to a pale 'straw' yellow and it has a natural lustre. It is used as plywood, for interior building work and domestic flooring. It's quite an easy wood to work with hand tools, and it also holds nails and screws, and glues easily. Paint, stains and varnishes all work well on spruce and terrific finishes can be produced.
Western Red Cedar: The sapwood is white, while the heartwood ranges from a dark, chocolate brown in the centre, to a salmon pink outer zone, which matures to a uniform, reddish-brown. Once dry and exposed, the timber weathers to a beautiful silver grey, which makes it the ideal choice for shingles, weatherboarding and timber buildings such as sheds. It is not a strong wood but it's easy to work with hand tools and doesn't blunt blades. Copper or galvanized nails should be used, because the wood's acidic properties can cause corrosion of metals and black stains in the wood in damp conditions. It's a wood that is easily glued, and takes stains of the finest tints without fading, although you may find that the grain tends to 'lift' after a while.
