I would suspect that a lot of the white wood is spruce and I agree that if at all possible use the spruce. Structurely, it is the very best wood for building stripper boats and is also the easiest to glue. You don't see people using cedar or redwood to build planes do you? I think that it is testimony to the strength of stripper wood / composite shell construction that it is possible to get away with using redwood for kayak construction. Even the very best old-growth redwood is weak and soft and splits easily. To my knowledge, redwood was never used for traditional boat construction even where it was plentiful. It is gorgeous stuff, however. On another site about guitar construction one of the makers was saying that he charged 20% extra for guitars with redwood tops because it took so much more care not to ding redwood during construction. BTW, old growth spruce is not stronger and lighter than second growth. It is stronger but it is more dense and therefore heavier because it has a greater proportion of latewood. As a rule of thumb, the more annual rings softwoods have per inch, the stronger per unit weight they are. Hardwoods are just the opposite, the fewer annual rings per inch, the stronger per unit weight.

Smiley Shields