
Woodworker’s Guide to Chatoyance is a book for those who love seeing wood coming to life and taking that lustrous look which clearly tells it apart from fake wood. Some call it luster, some call it grain depth or sheen, but what is exactly wood chatoyance? Those who dealt with the legendary Hawaiian Koa surely know that some wood species provide much more chatoyance, but which ones are they? And what is the best finish to achieve the highest chatoyance?
You will find answers to all these questions within this book, where numerical data are provided thanks to an innovative measurement technology. In fact the book reports the results of analysis on over 1’000’000 pictures from thousands of finished and unfinished wood samples.
In this book you will find:
- Explanation about the mechanics of wood chatoyance and how it can be measured
- Discussion about figure types and how they combine with chatoyance
- Chatoyance data for 573 wood species
- Discussion about which part of the tree and which cut provide the best results
- Information about what processes provide the best surfaces
- Results of finishing tests on 26 different wood species
- Information about how chatoyance is impacted by dying, roasting, sunlight and more






In the “compact edition”, you will not find the long section with high-quality pictures from each of the 573 species analyzed so far. This section is available in the full edition.
This book is available on Amazon in these countries:











