Identifying Wood

S.Vaskovskyi said:

Well cue-building is my new hobby I enjoy learning. I'm quite a newbie at it but I have already some favorite woods I used in my cues. None of them were mentioned and there are some more in my collection which are also amazing. Mother nature is so good at creating some real beauty.
Here are two pj cues I'm finishing with the woods I just love. Just interesting if it will be easy to guess which woods were used for the forearm and buttsleeve. In fact what is also interesting to me how many cues out there with the wood used in the second example?

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Your work looks great. Keep it up.

Biloxi Boy said:

Common 99.9%
bocote
cocobolo
ebony
maple, birdseye
maple, clear
rosewood, _________
rosewood, Madagascar (bois de rose)
tulipwood

Fancy
african blackwood
ash
blood wood
goncalo alves
holly
iron wood
kingwood
koa
lacewood
mahogany
maple, quilted
maple, spalted
maple, tiger/curly
olive wood
palm
pau ferro
pink ivory
purplewood
snakewood
wenge
zebrawood
_________ oak
_________burl

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I would change "purplewood" to "purpleheart", the name it is most commonly known by. I would also move purpleheart into the common woods category as it is used all the time internally (coring) as well as externally in the butt and even somewhat common for shafts too. And while tulipwood isn't super uncommon, I wouldn't exactly call it common and it is certainly out of place in your common list. And many of the woods in the "fancy" category aren't exactly fancy either, just less commonly used that the main staples. Not only is ash not uncommon, but it is the most common wood used in snooker cues, but if you are only talking about pool cues then it is pretty uncommon (but not at all fancy). Several other things could be mentioned as well.

Without giving this much thought, if categorizing the woods somehow is important to you, the categories should probably be something more along the lines of:
Common coring woods
Common shaft woods
Common handle woods
Common forearm/butt sleeve woods
Common inlay woods
Less commonly used forearm woods
Less commonly used inlay woods

And if you are stuck on using "fancy" woods categories for some reason, you could add an additional fancy woods category for shaft, forearm, and inlays but "fancy" sure is awfully subjective.

S.Vaskovskyi said:

In fact what is also interesting to me how many cues out there with the wood used in the second example?

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The first cue didn't do much for me personally but that second cue is quite a good looker. Nice looking work and design and wood choices on that one.

A rare or fancy wood you might add is Bubinga. Sometimes known as African Rosewood. It sometimes shows up in cues.

I've used it in the past for lens boards, quite beautiful with many different tones.

Poolplaya9 said:

The first cue didn't do much for me personally but that second cue is quite a good looker. Nice looking work and design and wood choices on that one.

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Thanks for the compliments.
When it comes to the first one it was my first experience with a leather wrap. I've never had a cue with a leather wrap and this one is the first I've built with a wrap for a customer. I liked the feel so much that I know one day I'm going to build a certain cue with leather for myself to enjoy it.

Bishop said:

Your work looks great. Keep it up.

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Thanks sir).

i think the different forms of ebony should be pointed out

Geosnooker said:

Not a huge challenge.

The wood used for 99.9% of cues are going to be of a half dozen species...and a couple of those you can eliminate at a cursory glance.

It’s ‘possible’ it’s some rare exotic wood but it’s also ‘possible’ a random airplane flying overhead is a Spitfire.

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With the popularity of coring the list has expanded to wood you never even heard of.

Saw a rubberwood burl cue the other day. Fairly stunning. Was that on your list?

4X8Pro said:

This link might help you. It has pictures of just about every kind of wood you can imagine.

http://hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/

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I thought this was a pretty fantastic site. On the main page of the site (as linked to above), if you click on any of the pictures for the listed woods it will send you to a new page just for that particular wood and the new page will typically have dozens and sometimes hundreds more example pictures of that wood as well as some basic information on that wood species. And if you click on any of those dozens or hundreds of pictures of a particular wood species, it will usually show you a much larger version of that picture, and if you click that enlarged version of the picture a second time it will usually give you an even larger more detailed version of the picture yet. Great site, thanks for sharing.