Identify wood from the end grain of a board/log

[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

[SwampDonkey]

I saw your thread a while back Haywood and if you had a scanner and zoomed into a tiny section covering 3 or 4 rings and scanned at the highest setting we might have had a better crack at it. Trouble with the forum size limits it's not crisp clear enough sometimes to see the physical aspects. A picture might look clear enough, but it washes out the rays and pores. 

[Jeff]

I simply HATE to remove the links to your photos, but I can't make exceptions for one member and not the others without adversely affecting the future of the Forestry Forum. We have a rule about the photos and there are many reasons why.

5 years from now I expect the Forestry Forum to be here. At least I truly hope it is, and I think many of you do as well. I expect to still be taking care of it. I expect to still be protecting all of the photos that create the hearts of the posts where they appear.  I cannot expect any other person on this forum to protect their photo posting areas outside of the Forestry Forum with the fervor that I will protect them with here. Its not responsible of me to, as its none of my business what you do with your photos that reside somewhere else. Given that fact, I must also protect the ideal that I hope people will still be able to post photos on the Forestry Forum 5 or even 10 or however many years from now the way they can now. When ever they want, when ever they need to. In order to do that, space has to be reserved, so thus the size restrictions that must be maintained and have been maintained over almost the last decade.

I feel bad when ever I remove someone's photo links, because I know they are simply trying to share. I know I would feel worse if I was to go to old threads from years ago to find that the information within them was destroyed because I was unable to protect it because through my own neglegt I allowed it to exist somewhere else other then under our protection here.

[VTMapleFarmer]

Great Post SWAMPDONKEY! I took a college course at Paul Smiths College on just identifying lumber by the cell structure of the wood. Its a great skill to have and it is very cool.

[sawbob011]

Funny, my dad does cabinetry and other fine wood working for extra money. Ive been in the shop with him as long as I can remember and even do my own work now and we never once would have guessed to id a peice of wood by the end grain. If there was any question we just made our best guess based on color smell and texture and call it good. Never would have guessed the end grain of a board would be so unique ttoo its speicies.

[SwampDonkey]

Where I'm from sawbob, we have so few hardwood species that it's not even a guess once we learn our species. Whose gonna mix up an oak with a yellow birch? Well, in log form I've seen it confused with balsam poplar and by someone whom was suppose to know.

[WDH]

The cellular structure as viewed from the end grain is distinctive by almost all species, especially the hardwoods.

[StephenRice]

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.
(Image hidden from quote, click to view.)

While I am definitely not an authority figure on wood identification, I think this looks very much like what we in America would call ebony.  I hate to see it used as sticker material though.  It seems like such a waste, kind of like using good black walnut for stickers.  Of course, overseas, people use teak wood for framing and decking lumber... sighhhhh...

[jim king]

While I am definitely not an authority figure on wood identification, I think this looks very much like what we in America would call ebony.

I dont think that is Ebony.  Ebony does not show rings  from what I have seen.

We have had a lot of trouble doing ID work using pores on tropicals,  some unrelated species can be identical to each other.  We have had better luck using the internal parts of the flowers and the leaves as to even how many and what type of micropscopic hairs they have on the bottom side.

In the tropics wood ID is very much in its infancy and every day we know that we know less than the day before.