Hasta La Ideas

When the wine shop across the street from me packed up to move, I saw a new dumpster out front and a huge stack of empty wooden wine cases inside the store. Doing the math, I asked the owner if I could scavenge some of the boxes before they went into landfill.

“Well, I can sell them to you,” he said. “This wood is from Chile.” He said it like the boxes were exotic.

“But it’s…pine,” I said. Found out or not, he still wouldn’t budge and wanted $10 per box.

Being able to distinguish pine from teak didn’t do me any good in this case, but for the designers among you that work with wood, learning to identify wood types by sight is as important as it is basic. For newbies among you, you’ll find identifying the common breeds is easy; just read our Wood Series and you’ll have a good start.

But that’s assuming you have a whole board to look at where you can easily read the grain/figure/color. If you’ve got a small piece, a weathered piece or a situation where only a small part of the wood is visible, to figure out what that is you can go more scientific. The Bible on this topic is R. Bruce Hoadley’s Identifying Wood: Accurate Results with Simple Tools, where he teaches you to ID 180 different breeds of hardwoods, softwoods and tropicals using your eyes and a loupe or microscope.

Then there’s the seriously scientific way to tell wood types apart. As NPR reports, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab in Oregon—the world’s only such facility—has a man named Ed Espinoza as their deputy lab director. A few years ago, an investigator asked them to ID a confiscated shipment of wood that was under suspicion of containing an endangered species. Espinoza somehow figured out that they could use a freaking mass spectrometer to calculate the breed.

Photo by Jes Burns of Earthfix

The mass spectrometer they use is a sophisticated machine called a DART-TOF (Direct Analysis in Real Time – Time of Flight) mass spectrometer…. Espinoza shaves off a small sliver of the wood. With tweezers, he feeds a sample into the DART. It needs just seconds to whiff the compounds and identify agarwood’s unique chemical signature.

In April, the lab became the first and only facility internationally certified to tell law enforcement that one sample is, say, legally traded Amazonian rosewood, versus contraband Brazilian rosewood. Shelley Gardner, the illegal logging program coordinator for the Forest Service, says the new DART technology gives law enforcement a better chance to stop illegally harvested wood from becoming someone’s guitar or a new dining room set.

There’s no word on what the DART-TOF machine costs, but we’re guessing it ain’t cheap; I wonder if Hoadley’s microscope method would be equally effective. In any case, there’s bound to be a demand for technicians who can identify different wood breeds. “International timber trafficking is a huge global business,” says the article. “Interpol estimates it’s worth up to $100 billion a year.” Anyone fancy a side job helping to nab wood traffickers?