Wood ID Help

[Ricc Havens]

Turning a travel coffee mug liner. Not sure what kind of wood. I wiped it down with thinner to wet and pop the grain. Looked at first like cherry, but the grain on the sides seems to have a little striations/grain pattern I haven't seen in cherry.

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Ricc Havens
338482338483338484338485338486338487

[Bob Bouis]

Sure looks like cherry to me. That quarter-sawn ray fleck effect is common for cherry, though you might not see it if you were turning bowls.

How's it smell?

[Prashun Patel]

I agree it looks like cherry. Quartersawn cherry can get that pixelated grain.

[John K Jordan]

I have seen the ray fleck in cherry, sometimes it is as prominent as in sycamore.

I made a bit of a hobby of identifying wood. Looking at a board or turning can be right on or way off - due to the natural variation, many woods look the same. You can do what most people do and just guess and write your guess on the bottom! I got started in wood ID when someone at a club meeting passed around a bowl with "cherry" on the bottom but when I looked at the end grain with a magnifier it was ring porous! No way was it cherry - black cherry is diffuse porous or occasionally semi-diffuse porous.

I bought R. Bruce Hoadley's book "Identifying wood" which helped a lot. The online Wood Database has some good tips and instruction and has closeup photos of the end grain of many species:

http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/wood-identification-guide/

If you really need to know the correct species, each US Citizen can send up to five samples per year to the US forest products lab for free ID.

Hey, I never heard of Elkhart TN. It looks like you are right down the road from me! Do you go to the Knoxville woodturing club meetings? (I am terribly terrible at remembering names - I forgot my wife's name once when introducing her to someone...) I'm just a couple of miles north of Clinton. If you get up this way I love visitors. I have plenty of certifiably genuine black cherry (I cut it myself from cherry trees) and lots of other species and I'm willing to share or trade.

I like the travel mug idea!

JKJ

[Leo Van Der Loo]

I’d call that Black Cherry every time.

[daryl moses]

I’d call that Black Cherry every time.
Yep, me too.

[Reed Gray]

Well, almost no black cherry out here. What I have seen in my flat work days would have a little of that. Even dry, it does tend to have a cherry smell to it. I have seen a lot of maple that looks like that too, though it tends to have more brown rather than red.

robo hippy

[robert baccus]

Definitely black cherry but with very wide growth rings which look different than the usual. I cannot get over how light colored your cherry is way up north. Ours is much darker here in E. Texas--so is our walnut.. However our cherry is programmed to crack on the way to the ground and again as soon as it smells a woodlathe.

[John K Jordan]

... our cherry is programmed to crack on the way to the ground and again as soon as it smells a woodlathe.

Ha! Location, location, location. Or maybe it's something in the water. The cherry I've cut here has been remarkably stable. I have blocks maybe 6" or 8" square and tubs of spindle squares I cut green and there's not even a sign of an end grain check nearly a decade later. (I mostly turn dry wood.)

Maybe some trees are just more stable than others. I had to take a massive black cherry down on one corner of the property since it was leaning toward a neighbors house. It was over 2' in diameter at the base. I gave a bunch away to turners, cut a bunch into blanks for me, split some into firewood, sawed a couple of big logs, stacked some rounds in a storage building, and left a few rounds on the ground. FOUR YEARS LATER those outside on the ground still had no cracks! A few years after that I did notice some end checking but not bad considering exposure to sun and rain for that long. I should cut one open and see how it is inside now.

When I hear stories of how unstable some cherry is, it makes me want to lock this stuff in a vault. Is big cherry growing for over 100 years inherently more stable? A species mutation? Maybe some wood expert can explain the big difference between this and cherry elsewhere.

BTW, I dug the root ball of this tree out of the ground with my backhoe (it was HUGE) and whittled it into chunks with a chainsaw. These seemed more dense, darker, and had more interesting figure than the rest of the tree.

JKJ

[Prashun Patel]

My experience matches John's. The cherry I've salvaged from downed trees here in NJ is remarkably stable. Early on I left an unsealed log out in the yard for a year. When I finally got around to turning it, it had barely begun to spalt spalt, and had zero checks. All the cherry from that log turned the darkest, deepest rust color in a year that I've seen on any cherry. The color and stability seem to vary tremendously with cherry.

Man, that cherry sure takes on a finish well, though, huh? Burnish it up, and barely oil it, and shines like a new penny.

[Bob Bouis]

Cherry that's very dark is sometimes that way because of fungal decay. Not saying that's what happened to yours, but watch out for it.

[Ricc Havens]

I have seen the ray fleck in cherry, sometimes it is as prominent as in sycamore.

I made a bit of a hobby of identifying wood. Looking at a board or turning can be right on or way off - due to the natural variation, many woods look the same. You can do what most people do and just guess and write your guess on the bottom! I got started in wood ID when someone at a club meeting passed around a bowl with "cherry" on the bottom but when I looked at the end grain with a magnifier it was ring porous! No way was it cherry - black cherry is diffuse porous or occasionally semi-diffuse porous.

I bought R. Bruce Hoadley's book "Identifying wood" which helped a lot. The online Wood Database has some good tips and instruction and has closeup photos of the end grain of many species:

http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/wood-identification-guide/

If you really need to know the correct species, each US Citizen can send up to five samples per year to the US forest products lab for free ID.

Hey, I never heard of Elkhart TN. It looks like you are right down the road from me! Do you go to the Knoxville woodturing club meetings? (I am terribly terrible at remembering names - I forgot my wife's name once when introducing her to someone...) I'm just a couple of miles north of Clinton. If you get up this way I love visitors. I have plenty of certifiably genuine black cherry (I cut it myself from cherry trees) and lots of other species and I'm willing to share or trade.

I like the travel mug idea!

JKJ

Thanks for the info. By the way - it's Elkhart, IN not Tn :) :)

Ricc

[Ricc Havens]

Thanks guys for the help and all the input! I really appreciate the Creeker community!

Ricc

[robert baccus]

I practiced and studied forestry for 50 years and cherry and WR Cedar this far south crack like crazy. All the comments on SMC over the years agree with what Foresters and timber buyers have told me over the years. Our black walnut is very dark and infested with ring shake to the point that I was unable to sell it to industry buyers. Usually turns well and beautiful in color. My turning friends rarely turn a piece without major warp and cracking. Myself, never, which is sad because of the nice color.

[John K Jordan]

I practiced and studied forestry for 50 years and cherry and WR Cedar this far south crack like crazy. All the comments on SMC over the years agree with what Foresters and timber buyers have told me over the years. Our black walnut is very dark and infested with ring shake to the point that I was unable to sell it to industry buyers. Usually turns well and beautiful in color. My turning friends rarely turn a piece without major warp and cracking. Myself, never, which is sad because of the nice color.

Yikes, in many, many logs I have only once seen ring shake in black walnut! The worst I've seen around here for ring shake is Chinese Chestnut - maybe a coincidence but the only two trees I got nearly fell apart, hard to even get a few respectable turning blanks for it.

It sounds like an enterprising person from my area could load up a trailer of turning blanks and slabs (of species not on the quarantine list, of course) and sell them in Texas and points west. We are up to our ears in maples, box elder, bradford pear, black cherry, ERC, (walnut,) sycamore, holly, sassafras, elm, oaks, dogwood, persimmon, redbud, birch, mulberry, dawn redwood, gum, sourwood, yellow poplar, paulownia, buckeye, etc, etc.

I could even throw in some big poison ivy vines just for fun.

JKJ

[robert baccus]

My bad. only the cherry warps and cracks badly. We have most of those species and most of the walnut works. The buyers are looking for veneer logs where any ring shake is a no-no.

[Bob Bouis]

For what it's worth, what little walnut there is around here (central MS) seems to be pretty vulnerable to ring shake.

But, you know, you take what you can get.