Timber identification again please

[devonwoody]

I am sorting out my timber storage and having a problem identifying timber again.
the two top pieces look like a soft wood but they are too heavy, I suspect oak and beech and the bottom right hand piece steamed beech. what do you think?

 

[marcros]

Top left looks like ash to me. Bottom beech or steamed beech. Can't see top left very well but prob beech.

 

[Glynne]

Top left looks like ash.

 

[woodbrains]

Hello,

Top left Ash, the other is hard to tell from the photo but looks like birch. It could be maple or sycamore. There is an easy way to tell that these woods are not soft wood. They all have pores on the side grain. The ash is ring porous and the pores are quite large. The others are diffuse-micro porous, you will have to look closely to see them, but they are there. Softwoods do not have pores present in the side grain (long grain, whatever you want to call it). All hardwoods do.

Mike.

 

[longinthetooth]

1 Ash 2 Birch (from the grain pattern, and its whiteness) 3 Just beech (why 'steamed'?)

 

[devonwoody]

Two better pictures of piece number 2

side grain of board.

top of board.

I have never used birch or handled a piece before, good for my kind of work?

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Two better pictures of piece number 2

That's hard maple.

In your first post the general quality and over-exposure of the image makes it difficult to tell what you have, but 1 might be ash as others have said, and 3 does seem to have steamed beech characteristics, i.e., the flecking of the medulla visible on the rift sawn face, and it is slightly pink in hue. Slainte.

 

[hanser]

No 1 looks like Ash but DW has marked it as 'heavy' (presumably meaning dense) I don't recall ash being a dense wood.

 

[longinthetooth]

How thick is no 2?

 

[devonwoody]

How thick is no 2?

22mm thick, and I have around six lengths.

That ash is definitely hard and heavy if its ash.

 

[longinthetooth]

I agree with

That's hard maple.

Ash as all woods can vary in density ... and that's definitely what it looks like!

 

[marcros]

If the colour of the ash is correct in the picture, it could be some "oily" stuff. I used some on my workbench. It is noticeably heavier Nd harder than the light coloured stuff

 

[woodbrains]

Hello.

Just goes to show the importance of good photos! My first guess ( with reservations) of birch is clearly not right. The new photo makes things clear that my second guess of maple is right, as others have said.

If you are comparing ash to softwood, it would appear to be hard and heavy, though you might think differently if you compared it to greenheart!

Mike.

 

[devonwoody]

Thanks all, so its ash, hard maple, and beech.

btw. I have a piece of greenheart, picked it up on our foreshore after a gale, and that is really heavy. (four feet of 3 x 3")

Sgian, its good to hear from you, have you returned to teaching?

 

[Kalimna]

Kinda bucking the trend here a bit, but I have only ever seen those flecks (in edge of board 2) in beech, not maple. The top of the board I have also seen patterns similar in beech.
Is it possible to have a hand-planed piccie of the edge/top of board 2, as the thicknesser/planer marks make it tricky to see fine detail.

http://www.wessextimber.co.uk/images/ph ... opean1.jpg
http://www.wessextimber.co.uk/images/ph ... opean2.jpg

Ok, the colour isnt a perfect match - but a lot depends on the nature of the camera photo itself, but I think the grain pattern (particularly the flecks) is consistent between board 2 and the above beech images.

Cheers,
Adam

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Kinda bucking the trend here a bit, but I have only ever seen those flecks (in edge of board 2) in beech, not maple.

Adam, hard maple and European beech have similar physical appearance with the exception of the colour, including the form of the medulla (flecks) on radially sawn or rift sawn faces. Prime hard maple is distinctively creamy white with slightly darker and prominent summer growth, whereas European beech is a muddy brownish off white, unless it's been steamed to take on the pink hues. That second set of photographs put up by devonwoody are almost certainly hard maple. In another example of hard maple you can clearly see the flecks of medulla in the front facing upper portion of the rear leg of the table in the image below. Slainte.

 

[Sgian Dubh]

Sgian, its good to hear from you, have you returned to teaching?

I haven't left it yet. I'm still trying hard to instil in learners all the wrong ways to design furniture and to then apply incorrect technical research and knowledge to it, followed by general incompetence in its construction, wood prepping and finishing. Slainte.

 

[Kalimna]

Sgian - thanks for the info, the only maple I had seen had a lack of medulla flecking.
It's always good to be able to improve ones knowledge.

Cheers,
Adam

 

[dickm]

I'm with Adam on this - it's beeck. Never seen those brown flecks on UK Acer species, but maybe Hard Maple does show them.

 

[longinthetooth]

I'm with Adam on this - it's beeck. Never seen those brown flecks on UK Acer species, but maybe Hard Maple does show them.

Oh yes there is! There's a beautiful fleck in sycamore that contributes to its essential character! How's your eyesight?

I'm with Sgian Dubh! Hard maple has a bigger, more beech-like fleck but from memory I'd say that the beech fleck is the biggest, which is why I was asking the thickness of the piece earlier to get the scale.