Teak

[Keith 66]

Thats Iroko for sure. I had a load out of a college where i used to work. You may think the tops are one piece but you will find they are joined sections about 6 - 8" wide, joined with a plywood tongue & glued with cascamite or similar.
Teak might have been used prewar but all the benches i have seen coming out of schools & colleges built in the 60's & 70's has been Iroko.
Bloke was trying to selll some at our yacht club last year, insisted it was teak but it wasnt & he would not believe it!

 

[custard]

Teak and Iroko have almost the same specific gravity (0.57 versus 0.62, close enough that sample variation will mean considerable overlap), they're both "ring-porous", so a quick glance at the end grain won't definitively resolve the matter.

A botanist might distinguish them apart because Teak has "terminal and vasicentric parenchyma", where as Iroko has "aliform parenchyma". No, I don't know what any of that means either!

So for the rest of us the clues are,

-interlocked or ribbon grain and it's Iroko
-golden yellow streaks and it's Teak (versus the light olive brown of Iroko)
-waxy feel and it's Teak
-faint spicy fragrance when working the timber and it's Teak
-wide boards (anything over 250mm) and it's almost certainly Iroko, Teak has only available been available as plantation grown for several decades and they fell plantation trees before they're very large

I can post some photos tomorrow of samples that I'm confident are Iroko and Teak, but it's my wife's birthday and if she catches me messing about in the workshop I'll cop for it!

 

[Matt@]

2nd pic, my money is on it being Iroko....

 

[Phil Pascoe]

About 35 years ago my mother had a house built, and she had iroko used for everything ... yup, everything - windows, doors, floors, skirtings, stairs, the lot. I had to pay a visit to the joiners, who were two guys of retiring age. I commented on a board that was on trestles up one side of the shop. Oh, one said, we bought that off a joiner that was retiring about thirty years ago, he used to make a lot of high class coffins, and do a fair amount of work on yachts. It's teak. I said I thought it was.
It was sixteen feet by two feet six by four inches. :shock:

 

[Mar_mite]

Maybe I'm just really desperate for it to be Teak. There was something that wasn't quite iroko to me. I've used iroko loads. In fact I made my kitchen from iroko in my last home. Does teak smell the same as iroko?

 

[Mar_mite]

Thats Iroko for sure. I had a load out of a college where i used to work. You may think the tops are one piece but you will find they are joined sections about 6 - 8" wide, joined with a plywood tongue & glued with cascamite or similar.
Teak might have been used prewar but all the benches i have seen coming out of schools & colleges built in the 60's & 70's has been Iroko.
Bloke was trying to selll some at our yacht club last year, insisted it was teak but it wasnt & he would not believe it!

The boards that I think are one piece, definitely are. At least two boards however are joined. What's to say these aren't pre war?

 

[Matt@]

iroko has a very distinctive smell (dreadful!) - very easy to tell the two apart using smell IMO

 

[Mar_mite]

Yes. I know the smell of iroko well. Im thinking if I rub some of it down and it smells of iroko, it's because it is iroko.

 

[custard]

With some timbers smell is a dead give away, but Teak/Iroko less so.

If you get a faint spicy smell it's probably Teak, but if you don't get much of anything it could still be Teak...or it could be Iroko!

From the checklist I gave the least subjective and strongest indicators are,

-ribbon grain and it's definitely not Teak but may well be Iroko, that one's simple and clear. If you don't know what "ribbon grain" is google it, once seen never forgotten. If there isn't ribbon grain it doesn't mean it's not Iroko, it just means the question's still open.
-there haven't been wide boards (wider than 250-300mm) of Teak available in this country for forty, fifty years or maybe even longer.

The boards in Marmite's photos sure look like Iroko to me.

 

[Racers]

The ones in the photo look like teak no sign of ribbon grain.

Here is another teak photo varnished and plained.



This is an iroko casket I made for some ones ashes to be buried in on top of an iroko occasional table, you can see how colour changes when exposed to light.



Its best to take a block plane and clean a bit up, but what ever it is I would buy it.

Pete

 

[Jake]

The ones in the photo look like teak no sign of ribbon grain.

If you enlarge the second pic it looks interlocked (but could do with more cleaning up to be sure).

 

[custard]

Here are three sawn boards from my workshop, on the left a wide (400mm+) board of Iroko, in the middle is Teak, and on the right is more Iroko. If you looked at the narrower boards individually you'd be hard pressed to say what timber they were, all you could say is that the wide board is overwhelmingly likely to be Iroko just because you can't get Teak boards that wide.

Here's the narrow Teak and Iroko boards after planing. In a photo not much difference, you can see a bit of the silica deposits in the grain of the Teak, but to be fair you can find the same thing with many timbers. In the workshop the Teak board definitely feels a bit waxy, and it has a very faint aromatic or spicy smell. In the flesh it looks nicer, it planes smoother and is generally a more appealing timber, but unless you're a wood-aholic the difference isn't all that huge.

Here's a photo of the end grain on these two boards, Teak is the narrower of the two. Again, not an awful lot of difference. A botanist might be able to tell them apart from this, but I couldn't.

Here's a photo of some Iroko ribbon grain. I'd say that's the strongest clue you're likely to find. Teak never has ribbon grain, but Iroko (along with Sapele, Mahogany, and others) sometimes has ribbon grain.

And finally, here's some of the shelving in my workshop. This also is reclaimed school lab worktops, cheap stable hardwood that's ideal for jigs, bending forms, garden furniture, and utility shelves. I too would have liked it to be Teak, but it's not, it's Iroko!