Different Types of Woodworking: 12 Crafts and Their Woods

The different types of woodworking fall into a dozen crafts that recur across the leading guides: carpentry, joinery and furniture making, cabinetmaking, woodturning, wood carving, scroll sawing, marquetry and intarsia, pyrography, boat building, luthiery, green woodworking and finishing. Wikipedia's definition is simply the skill of making items from wood, and each craft is a different answer to one question - do you shape the wood by cutting it away, by spinning it, by joining pieces, or by decorating a surface?

• Carpentry - building and repairing structures: framing, decks, stairs and trim. It is the larger of the two occupations the BLS counts (see below).
• Joinery and furniture making - fitting pieces together with cut joints such as the mortise and tenon or dovetail; our types of wood joints page lists them.
• Cabinetmaking - cabinets, wardrobes and custom storage, with their carcases, drawers and doors.
• Woodturning - shaping wood spinning on a lathe with hand-held tools: bowls, spindles, pens, chair legs.
• Wood carving - removing wood with knives, gouges and chisels; sub-styles include relief carving, chip carving, whittling, chainsaw carving and power carving.
• Scroll sawing - cutting intricate shapes from thin stock with a fine reciprocating blade.
• Marquetry, inlay and intarsia - pictures and patterns built from veneers or shaped pieces of different woods.
• Pyrography - decorating wood with burn marks from a heated pen.
• Boat building and luthiery - two specialist crafts: hulls and spars, and guitars, violins and other stringed instruments.
• Green woodworking - working freshly felled, unseasoned wood with hand tools.
• Finishing - sanding, staining and coating; it is a craft of its own, and the BLS counts furniture finishers separately.
• Digital and CNC woodworking and epoxy work - newer categories some guides add.

The crafts pull toward different woods, and the USDA Wood Handbook's side-hardness figures (12% moisture) explain why.

• Carving and whittling want soft, even-textured wood. Wikipedia lists aspen, basswood, butternut, black walnut and oak as carving favourites and calls basswood particularly popular with beginners; basswood is 410 lbf, quaking aspen 350 lbf, butternut 490 lbf.
• Furniture and cabinetmaking use the mid-hard hardwoods: black cherry 950 lbf, black walnut 1,010 lbf, northern red oak 1,290 lbf, white oak 1,360 lbf, sugar maple 1,450 lbf. See hardwoods for furniture.
• Carpentry and framing run on softwood dimension lumber - the handbook says retail yards stock it mostly in pine, fir, hemlock or spruce. See wood frame construction.
• Green woodworking uses whatever was just felled; wet wood is much softer to cut, and Wikipedia notes that makers exploit the shrinkage as it dries to tighten joints without glue.
• Marquetry and intarsia combine several species for colour contrast, so knowing each wood by eye is part of the craft.

If you are handed a board and do not know what it is, WoodLens can name the likely species from a photo of the grain.

If you mean the different types of woodworkers as occupations, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics splits them into two families.

• Carpenters construct, repair and install building frameworks and structures. BLS counts about 889,700 carpenter jobs in 2025, about a quarter of them self-employed, with a median annual wage of $60,580 in May 2025 and 4% projected growth from 2025 to 2035. Its occupation profile describes construction carpenters, rough carpenters who build temporary structures such as scaffolds, and wood flooring installers.
• Woodworkers make wood products in shops and factories: about 199,900 jobs in 2025 with a median wage of $45,310. The largest group is cabinetmakers and bench carpenters (81,800), then woodworking machine setters, operators and tenders (60,900), sawing machine setters (41,200) and furniture finishers (15,900).

Trade shorthand adds a finer split inside carpentry - rough carpentry (framing, formwork), finish carpentry (trim, stairs, doors), joinery and cabinetry - but there is no official list of exactly seven types; different sources cut it differently.

Woodworking predates our species' written history by a long way. Wikipedia summarises the finds: shaped, notched sticks from Kalambo Falls in southern Africa about 476,000 years old are the earliest woodworking known; the Clacton spear from England is about 400,000 years old and the Schöningen spears from Germany about 300,000. Ancient Egyptian furniture already used mortise and tenon joints in the Predynastic period, and animal glue came into use in the New Kingdom.

Timber framing, the heavy-timber building craft, has its own long record: the earliest surviving French half-timbered buildings date from the 12th century.

Whatever the craft, dust is the shared hazard. OSHA notes that the National Toxicology Program lists wood dust as a known human carcinogen and IARC classes it as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1); it also causes eye, nose and throat irritation, and western red cedar dust has been shown to cause asthma. Fine dust that builds up can be a fire and explosion hazard. Use dust collection at the tool, a fitted respirator for sanding and turning, and clean up with a vacuum rather than a broom.

Finishing adds a second hazard. The USDA Wood Handbook warns that rags and sponges wet with oil-based stain, oil or urethane can combust spontaneously; immerse them in water in a sealed metal container right after use. If anyone has breathing trouble or a reaction after exposure, see a doctor.