Identify wood from the end grain of a board/log

[SwampDonkey]

I was participating in another thread on the forum to id a piece of wood and instead of letting the information get burried, I decided to make a new thread in here to help folks id some sawn lumber or logs by looking at end grain.

Tools of the trade:

A 10 x hand lense




A sharp utility knife or carving knife.




Take your utility knife and cut a fresh surface on the end of a board. With dense, harder wood, some fine sanding paper may help clean up the surface. Use some water or saliva on the fresh cut surface to make the grain stand out.

Getting down to it

Hard maple end grain(sugar maple and black maple): Growth rings are distinct. Pores are indistinct without a hand lens, uniform in size and evenly distributed throughout the growth ring. Broader rays visible to naked eye, as wide as the largest pores, separated by several narrow (intermediary) rays, narrower rays are barely visible with hand lens.



Yellow birch end grain: Often growth rings won't be seen without hand lens. Pores appear as white dots to naked eye, largest pore wider than large ray, uniform in size. Rays are not distinct with naked eye.


Black cherry: Rays distinct with naked eye. Pores not visible without magnification.



White Ash: Earlywood pores are large, distinct to naked eye, forming band of 2-4 pores. Latewood pores small with parenchyma forming narrow sheath around the pores. Rays are barely visible to naked eye.



Butternut: Earlywood pores visible to naked eye, fairly uniform but decreasing in size on the outer margin of the ring, diffuse to semi-diffuse porous. Rays indistinct without hand lens, uniform width.



Just to skirt some cornfusion  , my use of 'vessel' <> pore. You'll also notice that on diffuse porous wood, such as maple, the early wood is wider than the latewood. On ring porous wood the darker ring is early wood because of the larger pores making it appear darker, but it is less dense.

Also, the pores go out radially between the wood rays. In other words, a ray doesn't cut through a pore. If it looks that way, like on butternut, or white oak, that is tylosis and nothing to do with a ray.

[Tom]

.............or a 5 inch astronomy telescope at 150 feet. 

[Jeff]

Swamp do you have a red maple or "soft" maple sample available for comparison?

[SwampDonkey]

Jeff, I might be able to find a sacrificial piece of red maple. Maybe a piece over at the marketing board wood yard. It's not that it's hard to get my hands on, it's that I never cut it and I'de have to kill a crop tree.

[SwampDonkey]

OK, found this red maple that the road crew turned up on the edge of my woodlot.

Red maple (soft maple) end grain: Growth rings not very distinct. Pores indistinct without a hand lens, evenly distributed in growth ring, often present in multiples of 2 to several. Rays visible to naked eye, broadest as wide as largest pore.

end grain

split surface with characteristic ray fleck of maples.

Aspen end grain: Growth rings distinct because of darker latewood, but not conspicuous, wide. Pores are numerous, small, but indistinct without hand lens (even then it's a challenge), more crowded in earlywood, decreasing gradually in size in latewood, semi-ring to diffuse-porous. Rays are very fine and hardly visible even with a hand lens.



Rays are very faint at this magnification (~ 7x)

[WDH]

Isn't it true that hard maple typically has two types of rays?  One type is wider and easy to see by eye.  The other is very narrow and may not be visible without a hand-lens?  Soft maple, on the other hand, has rays of more uniform width without there being two very distinctly diiferent ray widths?  I was just wondering how hard-and-fast a rule is this?

[SwampDonkey]

WDH, from what I've studied and researched on it, your bang on. I think I've described that hard maple have those smaller 'intermediary rays' that are hard to see.

cheers. 

[WDH]

I love identifying wood.  Decades ago when I was in Forestry School, I competed in the Forestry Conclave in the Wood ID competition.  My daughter is now attending Forestry School (shows how old I am!) and recently competed in the Wood ID competition.  It brought back a lot of old memories as I helped her prepare samples and study for the competition.  I really appreciate all the photos and wood ID tips that you are posting.  A person has to keep learning.  Thank you!

[Phorester]

A good point on identifying sawn wood, SWAMPDONKEY.  Looking at the end grain is the surest way to id boards.  I have been frustrated on this Board (no insults intended on anybody!!) and other Boards, and in 'real life' when somebody wants a species id of a board without a good clear picture or sample of the end grain.   Most times it just can't be done without this.

A good thread, glad you brought this up. 

[mdvaden]

Can you ID the wood fairly easy with a chainsaw cut end? Or does the wood grain end need to be sanded or smoothed with a knife blade?

[Phorester]

Knife blade.  You have to have a clean, sharply cut cross section of the growth rings.  You only need a few rings, so you can just cut into the edge of the wood piece.  Sanding might fill the pores with sawdust and obscure identifying details. 

Wetting the cut edge might bring out the growth rings more. Spit or water.

[TexasTimbers]

Hoadley covered this, and I always wondered where, if one existed, I could get a fairly exhaustive thumbnail reference book for North American woods? He referenced quite a few himslef but of course there are dozens and dozens that are here even in my little ol neck of the woods. Anyone know of such a reference?

[mdvaden]

Is there a certain area of cross-grain needed to make the ID, typically?

Would a 2" x 2" piece suffice for most species, or can someone use the end of a 1" board and find enough?

[SwampDonkey]

Hoadley covered this, and I always wondered where, if one existed, I could get a fairly exhaustive thumbnail reference book for North American woods? He referenced quite a few himslef but of course there are dozens and dozens that are here even in my little ol neck of the woods. Anyone know of such a reference?

Textbook of Wood Technology

Try to find the 4th Edition, 1980 publication. If you live near a University that teaches forestry, you may be able to pick one up at their bookstore. I'm sure there would be a copy in their forestry/science library. The pictures are black and white.

[SwampDonkey]

Is there a certain area of cross-grain needed to make the ID, typically?

Would a 2" x 2" piece suffice for most species, or can someone use the end of a 1" board and find enough?

Any sized piece would do, but it's good to get a piece showing 4 or more growth rings to see the general transition between early and late wood.

[Gary_C]

I have one of those 10X magnifiers, but I can never seem to get it in focus from the seat in the forwarder when I have to separate the red and sugar maple from the ash, red oak, basswood and aspen. What I see does not look at all like your pictures. And especially not when it starts to turn a little dark from the laying in the sun. 

[SwampDonkey]

If your cutting pulp it really doesn't matter except some mills want popple and birch separated and that's not hard to tell from the bark. If it's sawlogs and veneer, then someone eventually will be leaving the seat with scale stick and peavy in hand.   Only then will the hand lens be handy.

[Raphael]

I don't think you'll need a 10x lens and knife to ID these rays.

[SwampDonkey]

Nope 

[WDH]

Looks like white oak.

[jon12345]

Bubble blowing is my preferred method of discerning between oak families

I got a notebook full of end grain ID the only problem is it is (was) my own interpretation, even I cannot identify them from the drawings now 

[SwampDonkey]

White oak: broad wood rays seen without lens-often 1 " or more along the grain (look at flat sawn surface of board), broad ray fleck on radial surface (split a piece of firewood). Late wood pores are indistinct with hand lens, tyloses in earlywood of heartwood.

red oak: broad rays absent, late-wood pores distinct with hand lens-orifices plainly visible, rounded. Tyloses usually absent but may be found sparsely in early-wood pores.

Help  

[metalspinner]

SD,
I tryed scanning some samples, but definition in the pic is already lost prior to optimizing for forum uploading.  Any tips to get the resolution you have in your samples?  The scanner I am using is 2400 X 4800dpi.  I used a razor to shave a clean surface.  How large were your samples that you scanned?  Did you crop them after scanning?

Thanks, Chris

[metalspinner]

This is the best resolution I've come with so far.





The actual growth ring width is about 5/16".  Under a 10x hand lens I could not distinguish any more detail than with the naked eye. 

My guess is that this is sweetgum.  Others have guessed that as well here...

http://www.forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=22793.0

[WDH]

Definitely a diffuse porous hardwood.  Looks most like sweetgum or blackgum to me.  I would not argue with sweetgum with what you show here.

[metalspinner]

From the pic, can you tell me how you came to that conclusion?  I have a hard time seeing anything but the growthrings and the color variation.

[WDH]

There is no differention within the growth ring between the early wood and the late wood.  There is very little differentiation between the growth rings as well.  Everything is kind of uniform and bland.  No distinctive features.  Homogenous.  Poplar would have a band of marginal parenchyma that distinctly separates the growth rings (as would all the magnolias species).  I don't see it here.  All the pores are the same size, so that rules out all the ring porous hardwoods with distinct grain like oak, elm, hackberry, hickory, ash, locust, mulberry, walnut, sassafras, honeylocust, catalpa where there is a distinct difference between pore diameter between cells in the early wood and the late wood.  Some species have a gradual gradation in pore size across the growth ring like walnut, persimmon, willow, and cottonwood.  These are called semi-ring porus hardwoods or semi-diffuse hardwoods.  I don't see that in the photo.  Cherry has one row of large diameter cells in the early wood, then the remaining cells are all the same, and I do not see this row of large diameter cells in the pic.  Other diffuse porous hardwoods like maple and birch have very distinct growth ring boundaries (contributes to their visual grain in a board), and I don't see it in the pic to the extent that I would suspect if it were one of those two species.  Beech and sycamore are diffuse porous like sweetgum, but the rays in beech and sycamore are very large and unmistakeable, creating that wonderful ray fleck that we all love.  So, by the process of elimination, that does not leave much but sweetgum and blackgum (or tupelo gum if it is a swamp species). 

I clearly remember from my wood ID training (eons ago in the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs ruled the earth) that if a sample was totally non-discript and had very homogenous features from a growth ring standpoint, and it if had a striking red heartwood or a shimmery patina, it was usually sweetgum.

Hope that helps.  Anyway, that is my reasoning...........

[metalspinner]

Wow!  All of that from a blurry picture! That was a virtuosic answer.

So in this case identification has as much to do with what we can't see.  The sample I was trying to compare it to is in Hoadley's book Identifying Wood on page 135.  I think his sample is from under a microscope.

Thanks.  This is kind of fun, but I'm glad there is no test!

In the red oak species, can one tell the difference between Southern Red Oak and Northern Red Oak without microscopic enlargement?

[WDH]

It might have been a virtuosic answer, but it might be a wrong virtuosic answer!

No, you cannot readily distinguish southern red from northern red from a wood sample.

[SwampDonkey]

metalspinner, when scanning I use a 4 inch wide sample BUT, what you want to do to keep clarity and resolution is....

First off, moisten the sample. When you go into your scanning wizard, do your preview. Then, use your mouse and resize the scanning margins to scan a 1" square section, maybe even 0.5". That is going to produce a fair size picture at the max scanning resolution you have. You want to be able to get a good sized picture with minimal resizing (shrinking) and compressing as possible. You may want to crop out a smaller section of that scanned section. I find 'Photoshop' 'ImageReady' or 'Elements' to have the best scaning features, but I'm not that well familiar with a lot of other scanning software.

Give that a try and see how ya make out.

[metalspinner]

Mulberry?




I see what I believe are rays going from the top right corner of the pic down to the bottom left.  Does this rule out osage and locust?  Looking at the QS face for ray fleck, but what I am seeing is very small, so I'm not sure that is what I see.

[SwampDonkey]

Split a piece, dampen, scan.

Yes those are rays, but very crowded and fine. Looks like the cut face is covered in burs of fibres, probably the knife was dull. Can't be mulberry, the rays would stand out more with the naked eye. Keeps coming up as sweetgum/redgum to me. The sapwood if present has a pinkish hue and most often is sap stained. I see sap stain in the first pic.

[metalspinner]

SD, The second pic is from a different log.  I don't think my first posting of this latest sample went through like I wanted.  Sorry for the confusion.

The latest pic came from a log that is bright yellow.  I cannot tell the difference between mulberry and osage in lumber form.  Even the bark looks similar.  The leaves are long gone.

I'm still trying to get better resolution on the scanner. 

[Radar67]

What you make of this SD?



Stew

[WDH]

Oak for sure.  Looks more like red oak because you can see into some of the open pores in the earlywood.  In almost all white oaks, chestnut oak excepted, the pores are totally filled with crystalline structures called tyloses.  I don't see that in the pic, so most probably a red oak.  Nice pic!

[SwampDonkey]

I'd say red oak also. For a minute I couldn't figure out what that vertical pattern was between the broader rays, but it's the late wood pores in line with finer rays. A little out of focus there. Late wood pores in white oak are indistinct with a hand lens.

[SwampDonkey]

Interesting enough, sugar maple, yellow birch, beech, white ash, black walnut, butternut and northern red oak all have around 21 % vessels (pores) by volume. 

And hardwood also have tracheids: 1)vascular - which look the same as pores in the cross section and 2)vasicentric-have bordered pits. But, there structure is a bit different than softwoods.

We're getting microscopic here.

I have some pretty good micrographs showing the different types in my copy of Textbook of wood Technology. A lot of this stuff is over my head to folks, if I can't see it by eye than it's hard to understand.  Also, not many of us are biochemists and physiologists.  

[WDH]

SD,

I have always liked sclerids .

[SwampDonkey]

Some of them encase a pretty good tasting nutmeat to. 

[Samuel]

God I hated that part of Batony...figuring out tree species under a microscope.  I swore I would never use it and todate...  14 years later I still haven't.   

[SwampDonkey]

Fortunately most of us with experience with the tree species we are dealing with don't need a hand lens to identify. But, I still meet the old fellow that should know his species. But still mix up basswood for some exotic tree that wouldn't even grow here and even saw one fellow mix up balm-of-gilead for red oak. I'm not going to bash you technicians over it, but call a spade a spade they were both technicians.

[Jeff]

even saw one fellow mix up balm-of-gilead for red oak.

I've seen that exact mistake as well. By one of my cousins who is a  woodshop teacher. 

[beenthere]

SD
What is a "technician"  ??

[SwampDonkey]

forest technician, 2 year diploma, used to be 1 year with 2 years experience.


Tom, I know you want to say something.

[Tom]

They used to call that an Associates Degree and it wasn't worth beans but to get you into a 4 year school. 

[SwampDonkey]

I don't want to rant, and it has nothing to do with anything said in here. But, what turns my stomach inside out is to go down to the Forestry Canada, Maritime Regional building and walk into a theatre where over the door it reads Irving Theatre, just because some business man had $10,000, or what ever it was to throw around, an MBA, and whose parent company was subsidized by the government since the purchase of the NB rail road back in 1945. Instead of putting George Miller's name up there who was Chief forester with a B.Sc.For and M.Sc.For. in the province from 1927-1959, a veteran of WWI, a surveyor with a B.Sc.CE,  and began the program for fire management in NB, came from Tracey Mills in Carleton County NB, and a cousin to my grandmother. Just shows you that money over rides logic. 


There is just some times a guy has to unload. 

[Tom]

I agree, Swamp Donkey.  A family with money can get their name spread all over the county while worthwhile "doers" go unnoticed.   There is a saying that you are famous as long as you are remembered.  The good thing about that is that there are people like you who won't let the deserving go unnoticed or be forgotten.  Perhaps writing his name in a book telling his story is one of the ultimate tributes. 

Usually a building with a name will have people, years later, asking "who is that guy?"  Then they tear the building down.

[Samuel]

An associates degree hey?    I am happy that my employers haven't heard that, or I would have to get a new job someplace.

With an associate degree maybe the new Wal-Mart would hire me as a greeter...

hmmm...  Anyhow food for thought...

The two associations in Alberta (RPF's and RPFT's) are considering a merger this year.  Given that the Alberta Regulated Forester's Act does not differentiate between certification hierarchies,  it would be a smart move.  In Alberta we are referred to as Registered Forest Professionals rather than the RPF or RPFT however I like to still consider myself a tech, however given that Tom has listed me as equal to a Wal-Mart greeter, I may have to reconsider. 

[SwampDonkey]

They might as well do it here to Sam, since apparently a bachelor of science degree doesn't mean anything to many employers, most being private companies or corporations. I don't know if it ever did matter to most of them, certainly being an RPF in NB didn't increase your salary. The job was more based on wit and charm than it was knowledge and practice. I read a job posting a couple months ago for a biologist employed by forestry Canada for a salary of $28,000.  Must have been a real bottom feeder. I think it was a 3 year term. I read on UNB's website that average starting salaries for graduating foresters was $46,000. WHERE? I've never seen those wages yet in 15 years. I don't even see those wages in BC or Alberta advertised on the Forestry job site. The only comparable pay is with unions. Not many foresters are unionized around here. As one consultant stated, there are more foresters than jobs.

[Radar67]

I have another unknown for you to ID. This is a dark grained wood I found at the local hardwood mill. They use it for stickers and this was in the broke, trash pile. Let me say this up front, I do not have a clue as to what this is, but for some reason, I want to say it resembles mahogany.

I scanned this chip in, it is ½ x ¾ inches.

[WDH]

I bet it is an Indonesian hardwood.  Many of the kiln stickers my company uses in the big pine mills comes in bundles clearly marked from Indonesia.  They get very brittle and splintery after repeated cycles in the kiln, almost like fiberglass.

[SwampDonkey]

Looks very hard and tropical, but I have no idea from the picture. My keys and micrographs are for temperate areas of NA. It would be great if we had keys for tropical hardwoods or from other nations. Then, I wonder if we could read the text.

[Riles]

Great picture, by the way.

[Dodgy Loner]

Ditto what Riles said.  Scanning it in seems to be a great way to get a closeup of the endgrain.  Definitely a tropical hardwood, but beyond that I don't have a clue.

[WDH]

Dodgy,

I bet it is the same as or a similiar species that you are so used to using to stick lumber at my place.  You should be real familiar with it by now .

[Dodgy Loner]

Yep, that's what I was thinking.  You're definitely right about the fiber-glass texture.

[Radar67]

It was scanned at 1200 dpi and then resized and optimized with PhotoShop.

So, Danny is the new local sticker supplier?

[WDH]

I went to one of our big pine mills and they let me have some of their broken stickers.  The mill uses 8' stickers for the kiln charges, and invariably, some of them get broken in use.  So the broken ones are sorted out and put in a dumpster destined for the landfill.  I got several pick-up truck loads of these stickers and they work great.  I have enough to sticker about 6000 bd-ft, which is way more than I ever need to have on sticks at one time. 

So, if you need stickers, contact some mills in your area and ask them if you can have their broken stickers that will be otherwise burned or land-filled.

[SwampDonkey]

Ok, a wood ID for this board. I know what it is, but do you? It is hardwood. I'll give ya that for now, and this picture.




I darkened the image down some, don't know if that helps. When looking at the board, you actually see the grain better by looking at an angle where the light reflects off it.

[SwampDonkey]

This might help, don't know.

[beenthere]

elm

[Dodgy Loner]

beenthere beat me to it!  Can't really tell what species it it without looking at the endgrain.  I'm guessing it's a hard elm, because the earlywood pores look really small (especially in the second picture), but it could be an American elm.

[SwampDonkey]

It is elm. Here is the end grain if you want to try to narrow it down.

[Ironman]

I knew it was Elm, I knew it was Elm.  Hard Elm I reckon.  Those fine, tight rings are a dead giveaway.

[SwampDonkey]

The give away is the ribbon pattern of the latewood pores. It is American white elm, which have more dense pore ribbon pattern, making it a less dense elm than others. It was my grandfather's tree in his yard. Used to be a lot of big elms there and out at the mouth of the river were islands covered in big elms. The hydro dam was built down river in Beechwood, some 25 miles, and it flooded the islands in the 60's and killed the island elms. The stumps are still visible in the dry season when the water gets shallower and also at times when the hydro dam just above there has only one spill gate open.

[spencerhenry]

can anybody post a shot of chestnut? i cut alot of reclaimed material, but dont know what half of it is. chestnut is super valuable so it might be good for me to be able to identify it.

[SwampDonkey]

Try this.

http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/chestnut.htm



The site was suggested earlier by a member and posted in Indentifying Hardwoods, uses and properties

[spencerhenry]

thanks, thats what i needed. i was looking online yesterday and found a great synopsis of the lessons that you have been teaching here. i found it on the university of tennessee website.http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/pbfiles/pb1692.pdf

[SwampDonkey]

Ferric salt painted on the sapwood of maples will differentiate the "soft" maples from the "hard" maple groups. Blue stain indicates soft maple and green stain indicated hard maple. I'm thinking any fertilizer that controls moss growth and containing FERROUS SULPHATE will do the trick, I have not tried it.

[Tom]

I wonder if rusty water would work as good?   Putting rusty water on oak, or even touching it with wet iron, causes iron tannate (the black stain).

[SwampDonkey]

You could experiment Tom, but they say it has be a ferric salt and I was trying to find online what the product name might be. I came up with the fertilizer for now. I think the rusty water will most likely turn it black like the oaks. I'll have to look into it further, maybe something in the Wood Handbook or the Wood Tech Book.

[SwampDonkey]

I'm pretty sure from looking further it has to be the Fe +2 cation of iron in a compound known as Copperas (FERROUS SULPHATE) and is copper green. Here is a Wiki link to the compound. Basically, the hard maple won't react with a color change. It's applied to the green (wet) sapwood. I did see in this Wiki link that it's used on maple wood to make a silvery hue. Did anyone ever hear tell this use? I never did, and why would you want your maple to look silvery?  Maybe they mean to turn it weathered looking. Anyway, it's in the fertilizer to control moss, at 17 % concentration or there abouts. I'll see if i can get some to try.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(II)_sulfate