CStanford":qbpm6flz said:
American black walnut and poplar as a secondary wood, oak for the slips. The walnut came to me sight unseen, and wasn't too bad.
I very much like walnut, it's a treat to work and as long as it isn't kept in front of a south facing window it just gets lovelier and lovelier as the years go by.
But I've never really got my head around the different types of walnut,
Juglans Regia (English or European Walnut) and
Juglans Nigra (American or Black Walnut). From what i understand it's only Regia that crops edible nuts, and Regia is often grafted onto Nigra in order to get a commercial crop on a tree that thrives in local conditions.
Here's where the confusion starts, I've seen timber that really knowledgeable brokers describe as Regia (and that the FSC certification clearly shows has been grown in Europe), that's every bit as dark as the darkest Nigra I've seen. Furthermore, walnut growing in America is a big commercial business, using Regia variants, so why don't we see lots of the paler walnut available as American walnut? The really pale walnut with almost a faint blue-green tinge is something I've only ever seen in the UK.
Then to make things even more complicated, I used to live in California, where walnut was often described as Claro (with a hefty price premium) when to my eyes it looked no different from Nigra, and in fact I once heard that grafting Regia onto Nigra for Californian commercial walnut farms tends to trigger wilder grain, which then often gets misdescribed as Claro in order to gain a price premium!
All very confusing.
Plus you then get steamed and unsteamed, more so in the US than in Europe but I've occasionally seen it done here as well. I understand why steaming takes place, to even up the heart wood and sap wood, but it just makes the boards muddy and leaves the grain indistinct. In my view it's a retrograde step even though timber yards usually talk about it like it's a major plus.
Net result is that I tend to ignore the descriptions and just look at the boards in front of me when I'm buying walnut, if it's beautiful and fits the cutting list then I'll buy, if it doesn't then I won't.
Anyhow, long ramble but your walnut looks pretty good, Regia or Nigra or Claro or whatever!
