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  1. #1
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    Default identifying timbers through photography


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  3. #2
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    Nice to see some serious wood ID in the global marketplace.
    Wood anatomy is clearly species-specific.
    CSIRO (Forest Products Division?) produced a needle-card set of Australian wood ID. Radial, Tangential and Transverse sections, about 100X.
    Possibly 400 cards, we had a set in the LaTrobe lab in 1970.

  4. #3
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    RV, when you say Latrobe lab, were you in Traralgon? I was there '78-'82, knew a few people with CSIRO Forest Products there but can't remember any names now.
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  5. #4
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    No. Main campus Bundoora, 68-72. Prof A.B. Wardrop. Prof had come out of CSIRO (Hobart?) as LaTrobe opened. I was his PhD student #2.

    Up here, The fed Forest Products lab in Ottawa (?) produced a nice set of 40 woods of economic importance in Canada. Maybe 50 x 80 x 6mm,
    English, French and Latin labels.

    I've been making and collecting microscope slides of woods since I was a Master's student as USask. Just befor I went to OZ, my Prof sat me down for
    a serious trade. Maybe no more than 300 species in my personal collection. I got Drimys and other weird stuff.

  6. #5
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    Neat idea! Pattern-recognition software has come a very long way since I first saw it applied to tissue sections, and you can probably teach a computer to recognise woods pretty easily nowadays once you get decent representative samples (though there are always if & buts with biological material!). The article doesn't address the problem of how inspectors are going to get the necessary thin sections of wood to feed to their microscopes & software when they board a ship suspected of carrying illegal logs. You would need a mini-lab to prepare, cut & stain the material to et it ready for identifying.......

    Cheers,
    IW

  7. #6
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    I think this is the same guy that offers the wood ID service for furniture provenance.
    Some friends of ours went to a seminar he gave at one of their antique furniture club gatherings.
    Apparently he uses a syringe to take a sliver of wood from a pice as this is all he needs to do the deed.

  8. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by BobL View Post
    ...Apparently he uses a syringe to take a sliver of wood from a pice as this is all he needs to do the deed.
    Trying to imagine how that works. I don't see any role for the syringe - do you mean a cutting-needle like is used for bone biopsy? A sample a few mm in diameter gives you a fair area at the microscopic level, but at least one of the pics I saw in the article is probably 6mm plus. Having spent my working life looking at animal tissues, I imagine it's much the same for wood - some samples would be very easy to recognise & others much more difficult. I've never heard pathologists complain that a section was too big......

    Cheers,
    IW

  9. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by IanW View Post
    Trying to imagine how that works. I don't see any role for the syringe - do you mean a cutting-needle like is used for bone biopsy? A sample a few mm in diameter gives you a fair area at the microscopic level, but at least one of the pics I saw in the article is probably 6mm plus. Having spent my working life looking at animal tissues, I imagine it's much the same for wood - some samples would be very easy to recognise & others much more difficult. I've never heard pathologists complain that a section was too big......

    Cheers,
    Bearing in mind that this is 3rd hand info, the (arty) friends said the needle looked like a slightly larger than usual syringe and that it produced what looked like a fine splinter, whatever that means.
    They said a number of samples are taken from normally not visible locations of the furniture and the slivers of timber were then sectioned a number of times and put onto a microscope slide.
    Presumably that generates a sufficient area of timber to ID the wood.
    The friends said it is quite an expensive process so it's not something the average person would avail themselves of.

  10. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by BobL View Post
    ....The friends said it is quite an expensive process so it's not something the average person would avail themselves of.
    No, I know what it costs to process animal tissues, & the gear required. Botanical stuff is much more difficult, to deal with, and you need a pretty elaborate scope & scanner setup to feed the 'puter with the info it needs, so cheap it would not be!

    Cheers,
    IW

  11. #10
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    For me, wood anatomy ID. I need a piece about the size of an old-fashioned paper match.
    I MUST see radial, tangential and transverse sections.
    Pattern recognition software must be built upon those 3 planes of section.
    Otherwise the developers are fairly stupid.

    SE Asian "mahoganies" can be sorted quite easily that way.
    For anyone to suggest that a simple transverse/cross section is adequate, = idiot.
    I'll run a thousand logs past you with your blessing.

  12. #11
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    Here is a link to the book by Morris Lake refered to in the interview that Evan posted above:

    https://www.woodworkforums.com/f217/australian-rainforest-woods-characteristics-identification-morris-lake-195772

    There is a group called IAWA (Intl Assoc of Wood Anatiomists) who sepcialise in wood anatomy. A small group within IWCS also specialise in wood microscopy eg for identification, even using a 10X lens and features that can be seen and compared to authoratative sources eg to the Jugo Iliic's (CSIRO) book on Hardwiood Identification showing hundreds of wood images. IWCS have seminars on such subjects.

    One purpose for studying wood anatomy is to identify illegal acts wood sold as this when its actually that (often inferior) or using woods as murder weapon or to access entry or illegal trading in woods eg those on the CITES banned or restricted list. Chemistry of wood eg extractives, can be useful to augment what is seen under a microscope eg in the Dalbergias but is not always definitive and micrioscopy is not always definitive or certain either eg most Araucarias look very simikar under the microscope.

    I identify using my senses of touch (for density) colour and other features eg rays and importantly smell when a unknown wood is shown to me. If old or its a piece of antique furniture etc I struggle, but if freshly sawn, its provenance and some tree details are provided success is higher. I make a guess (its could be this ir that) and then suggest it is compared to a reference sample for higher levels of confirmation.

    Eugene

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