Is this chestnut??

[Jason White]

Major score or major bore?

I found a guy with some old beams that came out of a 1700's era timber-frame house here in the Boston area. Some of the sill beams were 8"x8' or bigger!

Could any of this be chestnut? If not, what is it?

Jason

[Thomas Knapp]

The pictures are not good enough to identify the wood. Pictures of planed flat grain, planed quarter grain and smooth cut end grain would help. The rough surfaces hide too much detail. They used anything that grew close by for some of those old buildings. There does seem to be some ring porous grain there, so it could be Chestnut. But it could be a variety of other woods also. Of course you need someone viewing the post that is good at identifying species. I can usually only identify the easy ones.
Tom

[Frank Drew]

Looks like wormy oak, so it might in fact be chestnut. :D

As Tom notes, the wood seems to be ring porous, so that narrows it down some (oak, chestnut, ash, sassafras, elm, sort of...).

Chestnut should be lighter in weight and softer than oak, and maybe a bit more brown than oak, at least in my experience. Just from the pictures I'd guess oak, maybe red oak, but it can be difficult to identify wood from photos.

[Stephen Edwards]

Maybe it's chestnut oak:D

[Martin Shupe]

Send a sample to the Forest Products Laboratory. They can ID it for you.

While some woods can be ID'd by a picture, many require a cross section (end grain) to look at the cell structure under a hand lens.

[Jason White]

I tried scraping and planing it a bit -- I don't smell oak, at least not red or white... Definitely heavy and dense, though.

In fact, it doesn't smell like anything except old house.

Jason


Looks like wormy oak, so it might in fact be chestnut. :D

As Tom notes, the wood seems to be ring porous, so that narrows it down some (oak, chestnut, ash, sassafras, elm, sort of...).

Chestnut should be lighter in weight and softer than oak, and maybe a bit more brown than oak, at least in my experience. Just from the pictures I'd guess oak, maybe red oak, but it can be difficult to identify wood from photos.

[lou sansone]

it looks like oak to me. I live in a house built in 1730 which has a oak frame, and one entire wall that is made from chestnut. chestnut has a very pronounced grain pattern. the closest modern living tree is sassafras in terms of grain pattern. it is also lighter in weight than oak. the one thing that does look odd, is that the timbers are not checked, and most of the old timbers I have seen from oak are checked.

Lou

[Gary Muto]

Whatever you call it, the wood looks nice...clear, straight, no checking...