Question about North American woods

macguy

macguy

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
With a lot of threads about banned woods or hard to get exotic woods. Is there a decent list of domestic woods that a cuemaker could use suitable for cue making?

I am not talking about staining, for that all you need is maple, but nice looking woods with good cue making qualities.
 
I don't know of any such list. This would be a great one for Crisp to chime in on; he uses a lot of domestics that he has found in the forests. Many of his woods aren't commercially available, though. There's just either not a enough supply or enough demand for them.

Many of the commercially available domestics like cherry, walnut, hickory, oak, pecan etc are a little light in weight or lacking in figure. Some make beautiful burls, though. It is hard to find dense figured domestics.

That said, you could have a beautiful cue made of nothing but domestics- especially if you implement coring in the cuebuilding process.
 
There are some awesome woods with as much figure as you could want on this continent. Oak, hickory, and maple are 3 easy picks. For appearance, good luck beating black walnut crotch wood. Check the recent post titled 'local wood'.
 
Hickory if dark colored is often a pretty wood and very hard. You have desert ironwood, misc. mesquites, misc. acacia, mountain mahogany, Texas ebony, Texas lignum, tamarisk, mountain laurel (if large enough), mulberry & osage orange (very similar), locusts, several exotic looking oaks, manzanita, madrone, etc. There are countless native woods that are very exotic & that can compete with any exotics from around the globe. Further yet, you have the warmer climate areas of the USA where numerous rosewoods & other exotics grow in folks' yards.

The problem with domestic cue worthy woods is that they aren't available to be bought. Most are smaller shrub trees that get skipped over by commercial loggers. Cut a 12" diameter mesquite & it might be cracked or hollowed out or severely degraded inside so it's useless as lumber. On top of that, these kind of trees don't grow tall & straight so getting a saw worthy log is rare. The only reason I am able to use woods like these is because I cut & mill them myself. So the issue isn't that we don't have any good woods. We have woods that rival the most exotic stuff anywhere. The problem is that it's unavailable.

Here's some alligator juniper that is almost identical to thuya. Thuya burl is the root ball of a small evergreen shrub that grows high on the arid mountains of Spain & Morocco. Alligator juniper is a small evergreen shrub that grows high on the arid mountains of the American southwest. Very similar.
 
How many continents have all white wood? We have American Holly. I posted a pic, but it seems to blend in with the background. We also have an ebony, persimmon.
 
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