Originally Posted by
Boatmik
It's also important to thing geographically.
As an example
Fir grows in North America only. So every other place will have to import it.
But Spruce grows in both Europe and North America. In both places it is a high class wood, so tends to be expensive sometimes unless someone is close to the source.
However a few years ago as Eastern Europe opened up there were quantities of not quite as good quality spruce originating from those areas but much cheaper than the Scandinavian stuff.
It's important to be aware of this with different locations. The timber in the timber list is only really to give an idea of the types of timber.
Light and not particularly strong - maybe prone to being dented. Excellent for joining pieces of ply - deck cleats, seat cleats chine logs. Or in protected places for gunwales or even potentially bottom skids with hardwood veneer on the underside (boat right way up) - Western red cedar, paulownia, maybe spruce
Medium strength - not prone to be being dented - good for unsupported structural pieces (basically when you have ply on two faces of a piece of timber it in never going to break as the ply takes the loads - but here we are talking about bits that glue to ply on only one face. Gunwales, frame arms, transom top frame, spars. Some pines, fir, in Australia Hoop Pine (not a pine but Aruacaria), King Billy pine (a lovely but now rare - not a pine but Athrotaxis). Some pinus radiata (nice stuff they grow in NZ - not the ugly plantation pinus twistus or pinus crapiata - its slang names in Australia) STraight grain is fairly important here and even more important for spars.
Hard and strong - bottom skids (or a thin protective layer on the bottom of lighter timber skids) - outside face on gunwales. Hardwoods around the world.
All have to be species that glue well because of our construction method. So teak, Australian White beech (Gmelina - had to look that up - obviously not a beech) True white Oak from North America - which are all hardish to glue because of oil content or with the oak an inability for the glue to get into the wood cells (or that's what I was told)
So that's the scheme.
Those are the three classes.
MIK