Anybody recognize this lumber?

Started by flyingvan, June 29, 2012, 11:41:01 PM

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SkagitDrifter


Red Balau.  Sure looks like it to me.  It's in the Mahogany family.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln

Don_P

#26
I've been kicking around in the barn, need to clean up some samples but here are a couple.
This is a couple of red oak boards, they were relatively fast grown, open grained. The one on the left is flatsawn, the cut is tangent to the growth rings the board has an oil finish that ambers it a bit. The board on the right is unfinished and is quartersawn, directly across the growth rings. They show the ring porous texture of the wood. This wood would be called course textured, it has large visible pores;


This is a zoom on a portion of the above photo. On the right hand board you can see part of a medullary ray running horizontally across the board, it is only a cell or two thick and you can see through it. In the left board you are seeing the ends of many rays as short vertical lines, the vessels are the longer vertical structures. Oaks have the largest, most visible rays and white oaks have the most pronounced rays of the oaks. Quarter to riftsawn(45* angle) white oak was the wood of choice in the craftsman style because of the beautiful, deep, ray flecking... chatoyance. As your eye moves the rays wink at you. We were all taught about the vertical transport mechanisms in trees growing up, rays do the horizontal transport, there are pits, valves, between the horizontal and vertical cells within a tree;


This is an unfinished black cherry board, hard cherry as opposed to the soft cherry from pin or chokecherry. (I think this is the blackheart I dropped on my engineer friend's fence  :-[) The color is deeper and the wood is harder. This board has alot of character and would be a low grade stick, it shows alot of things. The wood is diffuse porous and very fine textured, the pores are not visible to the naked eye and there are not visible vessels lined up along each growth ring as in the oak above. There are some gum streaks near the top of the board and visible in the end grain. I realize I should get a quartersawn piece to show the much finer ray flecking;


When I was a kid Dad made a coffee table in the popular style of the time. The oak was stained a black ebony and then was rubbed with white lead that filled the pores. You probably won't ever see that again  d*.


Don_P

This is a shot of the end grain of a couple of red oak boards. The heart is down on both pieces, the growth rings roughly left to right, the rays roughly vertical, the open pored vessels aligned along the springwood of each growth ring, again showing the ring porous nature of the tree. The lower is tight grained from an old growth, slow grown tree, the other from a faster grown "second growth" tree (really ~ the fourth forest here). People often say that the old growth was superior, well, that depends. Notice how much denser the wood substance itself is in the fast grown tree, they are a good bit stronger because there are fewer vessels per unit area.



Ernest T. Bass

Very cool and informative pics! A collection of these would make an awesome sticky..

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flyingvan

Here's an update on the wood---It's most likely left over from the construction of The Californian, the official tall ship of California.  (Makes me wonder if New Mexico has an oficial tall ship?) It was built here in San Diego 1983-1984.  The only clue to the lumber for The Californian is "The timber came from Belize, among other places".  I plan on finishing a sample on one side and taking a tour of The Californian to compare.  She's berthed at the San Diego Maritime Museum and open to the public.  It could be Araracanga, a hard wood exploited in Belize for ship building; the pictures look the same but geez so does just about every picture I pull up of every other kind.

This is Araracanga
Find what you love and let it kill you.


Don_P

At the risk of being a smart ..., it looks like mahogany to me. It's a big family when you gather all the relatives. yesterday I posted a pic of "red oak", I can rattle off 9 species in that group, 4 grow on my property. Once you take their clothes off it's all red oak except under a microscope and I wouldn't be any the wiser there. I'd call it mahogany.

I'll blame Andrew for encouraging me, I cleaned up a few more sticks for fun  :D
This was called Honduran mahogany notice the dark pores, not that that makes it what I think but that is one clue;

This is a shot of the end grain, this would be course textured, we can see the pores with our naked eye. It is diffuse porous, the vessels are randomly distributed across the grain.


I bought this as Batu, another name for Red Meranti or Red Balau. It is one of the Shoreas... luan. Notice the white in the pores, that is often a clue.


This is one of the white oaks, there are 8 common ones. Notice the rays, they are not real spectacular on this piece. If you look at the end grain notice this piece has some tangential grain and some quartersawn grain, relate that to the face of the board where the rays appear is the quartersawn, where the grain is more apparent is the flatsawn section.


This is an blow up of the end grain and gives, I believe, a positive ID of Chestnut oak, the only leaky white oak, many vessels are unblocked by tyloses, your whiskey would drain away almost as fast as if you had used a red oak.


I saw another red wood so I grabbed it, it has nothing to do with anything other than it's red and I like it, eastern redcedar. As an aside, when you see the name strung together like that "redcedar" it is a clue that this is not a true cedar, it is juniperus virginiana, a juniper. I'd have to go look it up but I believe western redcedar is a thuja.

flyingvan

I'm really enjoying this thread.  I've looked up every species that's been suggested, and I'm exploring this historically as well
Find what you love and let it kill you.

Ernest T. Bass

I'm proud to be partially responsible for these, Don. :) Love 'em..

Our family's homestead adventure blog; sharing the goodness and fun!