John Seybold is trying to put together a group order to Terramai (www.terramai.com). They are dealers in reclaimed tropical hardwoods from Southeast Asia. If you look on the website at the "world mix" you'll see the wood what he is interested in - it's a random mix of tropical woods salvaged from shipping crates. They mill it to 2"x3"x6', which, at $5/bd ft, comes to $15/piece. They also have fishtail oak, which looks nice too, at the same price. If other members are interested, they could pool an order and save on the shipping costs from northern California. They could draw lots and take turns picking out the desired pieces from whatever we receive. Please contact John directly at johnseybold@gmail.com, or (650) 269-5502.

A Note on Sketchup from Jamie Buxton

When I use Sketchup to draw furniture designs, I want to have more species of wood than Sketchup offers. It took me a fair amount of fussing around to learn how to do this, so I'd like to tell you how I do it.

1. Find a jpeg of the wood you want. Store it on your hard drive someplace. (I find www.certainlywood.com to be a great source. Find a pic, then right-click on it to bring up the Save As option.)

2. In Sketchup, click on the Materials tool. It is the button with a paint bucket on it. On the Materials floating menu, click on the button that is half blue and half white. Then click on the Create Material button. It is the one that has a plus sign, and what looks to me like a car battery. That will bring up a Create Material floating menu. Check the box that says "Use Texture Image."

3. Browse to the stored jpeg. Click okay. This should take you back to the Materials floating menu with that wood as an additional choice. If you only want to use this wood in one drawing, you're done. However, I find that if I need a wood in one drawing, I'm probably going to need it in another drawing, so I save it in a library form that I can re-use. To do this....

4. On the Materials menu, right-click on this new material. This should bring up a short menu that includes a Save As possibility. Click on Save As. Notice that Sketchup is trying to save the pic as a .skm file. That's Sketchup's format for materials. The first time you do this, you'll need to make a new folder to put your materials in. Give it some name like MyWood. Then save the .skm file to it. Thereafter, MyWood will be one of the materials libraries available on the Materials floating menu. The next time you collect a new wood image, do this Save As procedure to add it to the MyWood folder.