Type of wood

[pauljhaigh58]

Hi all please can you tell me what type of wood this is I know light wood is oak

 

[Ttrees]

Meranti by the looks of it to me.

Tom

 

[Chris Hawkins]

Sapale?

 

[Lorenzl]

I brought a job lot of offcuts and can identify the oak and beech but I am not sure which is the Sapale or Meranti. For what I do it probably makes no difference!

 

[pauljhaigh58]

Thanks I bought 2 shopping bags of off cuts for £20 loads of oak but no idea of rest

 

[Blister]

One looks like a split screen bus / camper

 

[Ttrees]

The meranti should be notably softer than sapele, i.e dig your fingernail into the much larger pores (long grain lines) on meranti compared to the very tight grain of the sapele, of which smells like carrots and parsnips to me when end grain is sheared.

The last common reddish timber which might be is sipo/utile
It has fleck like beech on some faces, and seems somewhere in between hardness of the above common reddish hardwoods.

 

[thetyreman]

The meranti should be notably softer than sapele, i.e dig your fingernail into the much larger pores (long grain lines) on meranti compared to the very tight grain of the sapele, of which smells like carrots and parsnips to me when end grain is sheared.

The last common reddish timber which might be is sipo/utile
It has fleck like beech on some faces, and seems somewhere in between hardness of the above common reddish hardwoods.

+1 I also found meranti has it's own smell, quite musky, sapele definitely has a carrot like smell and makes me sneeze as well, the easiest way to tell is look at the pores, meranti is very open pored, it's also very dusty to work with even with handtools.

 

[pauljhaigh58]

Just cut some off yea definitely carrots lol ,grain is quite tight hard to dig nail in thanks all

 

[Ttrees]

+1 I also found meranti has it's own smell, quite musky, sapele definitely has a carrot like smell and makes me sneeze as well, the easiest way to tell is look at the pores, meranti is very open pored, it's also very dusty to work with even with handtools.

I find it difficult to make a notable smell of the meranti, as the spicy iroko might be tainting my nose to some extent, but if I'd have to pick a work I think I would pick the same.
I do believe I get the same sneezing thing whilst sniffing some sapele!

I've only been stacking my red timber collection, whats mostly meranti , and covered mostly in iroko dust.
After handling the red stuff I noted some tingling on my lips, so I'm even less keen to use it now, even though it could be the iroko, as I normally don't stack timbers.
I reckon it just might be a bigger trigger for a reaction than the iroko,
as I had to stop working either for some time for my skin/mainly face not to be real itchy.
I think I noted this again whilst doing some more cuts of meranti on the tablesaw.
Not had anything like that in some time, (that's when I was actually doing some woodwork, lol)
so I'm going to be suspicious about the stuff.

 

[D_W]

not sure about the finished wood on the microbus, but the board to the right looks like khaya (african mahogany).

it can be hard to get a 100% definite answer with the various mahoganies and cedars. Khaya comes to mind as one where you can get five guitar blanks and none of them looks like the same wood, but they're all khaya. The brown tone and the pores are about right, though - it can have enormous deep pores, and then in a ribboned sample from the same seller, seemingly not have big pores, and then you look at the ends of the blanks and the endgrain looks the same.