Osage Orange?

[Tom Brouillette]

Did a roadside rescue on some wood yesterday. I believe it is osage orange. The first pic is of the entire pile. Some of these were 14" in diameter, and weighed more than I cared to tackle. I ended up taking home a few manageable sized pieces. I ran a small piece through the bandsaw, just to see if the freshcut grain was as colorful as what was exposed. It was, and as you can see in the 2nd pic, the milky sap oozed out just below the barkline. I'll mess with it some this weekend. Anybody have any experience with osage orange?339960339961339962

[Bill White]

Makes really good fence posts. You'll have to move the fence three times 'cause the ground will rot before the posts.
Now, on to you question. Turn it green, let it dry, finish turn. It is very difficult to turn when dry 'cause it is SOOOO hard. You will gradually loose the color. Nothin' you can do about that, but the object t turned will last forever.
I'd start with carbide tools if ya have 'em.
Bill

[Roger Chandler]

Looks like osage, but that tale tale crack at the pith makes me think it might just be Mulberry. They look similar, but osage is a much more stable wood, and Mulberry gets those dark edges around the crack itself..........I have turned both woods, and the way that cracked makes me lean towards the Mulberry. It may well be Osage Orange.....hard to tell with the size of the pics you posted.

[Prashun Patel]

I turned a couple pieces of OO. I had good luck turning it green to finish instead of waiting for it to dry. No cracking for me. The color turned in about 2 years to a rusty brown.

[John K Jordan]

I've turned a lot of osage orange. I like to cut it up into turning blanks and squares and let it dry before turning. That I'm turning now is about 8 years old. Great wood, hard and dense. Good color but turns brown fairly quickly. Some of what I have is splintery when spindle turned with a skew but not with gouges. I have never turned it green.

JKJ

[Chris Gunsolley]

Great find! That stuff looks beautiful, and it looks like you've got at least one crotch section? Be sure to post the bowls (I presume?) you'll make out of it, I'm looking forward to seeing those.

[carl mesaros]

Three things make me agree with Roger Chandler's assessment. The bark doesn't look like Osage, more like Mulberry. Also the growth rings are much larger than any Osage I have turned. The sap wood also looks more like Mulberry than Osage.
Could be wrong of course but I Currently have both species in the shop side by side and my vote goes to Mulberry.

[Scott DelPorte]

I built a guitar out of it. Good tonewood. Kinda chippy when you rout it.

[Bob Bergstrom]

+ 1 on mulberry. Bark sure looks like mulberry.

[Jim Barkelew]

If I remember right Osage Orange has sharp spines/thorns on the branches. Stick your hand in the pile of branches and if it comes our bleeding, its OO.

I have a short log under a tree that has been there for years. Still hard as a rock.

[Leo Van Der Loo]

I’m quite sure that the wood is Osage Orange.

If you look at the bark you can see where the bark is abraded, the color is orangey, that is exactly what happens with Osage Orange and not with Mulberry
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Osage will split just as well as other wood, and yes stable when dry.
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Also Mulberry has a bit different look, where the ribs cross like XX, Osage Orange tends to have straighter ridges.

Dark edges around splits, well have a look at the picture of freshly turned Osage Orange.

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There is one thing/test you can do to make sure it is Osage Orange, take some shavings and boil in water for 30 minutes or longer, this will give you a yellow dye, has been and is still used as such.

[Tom Brouillette]

If I remember right Osage Orange has sharp spines/thorns on the branches. Stick your hand in the pile of branches and if it comes our bleeding, its OO.

I have a short log under a tree that has been there for years. Still hard as a rock.
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Something like this? I set one of the heavier pieces on the tailgate of my truck, and as it rolled onto the bed, one of the spines plowed through the upper part of my palm before snapping off just below the base of my ring finger. It bled like a stuck pig, and I pulled a 1/8" x 3/8" long dagger out when I got home.

[Tom Brouillette]

That is some nice work, Leo.

[Brian Tymchak]

Ouch.. that hurts just looking at it. Yep, that's OO for sure.. also known as hedge apple around these parts.

[robert baccus]

OO for sure. Was once planted all over the prairie for living fences. Once only found along the Red river in Tex. and Oakl. There was a thriving business selling and shipping wagon loads of seed to desperate cow people and hence the now large range. They required pruning to keep the thorns low to the ground. Then came along this horrible stuff called barbed wire. Such is technology. It is what Foresters call a "lost tropical" along with Mullberry, Catalps, Black and Honey locust and others. Evolved in the tropics and were able to thrive in our colder midlatitude climates. There are others that have been introduced but these were here on their own. PS-- ring width is a product of abundant sunlight and can change in the same tree. Like most tropicals it has large showy flowers/fruit, large leaves and often very hard and durable wood. Many have specific gravities of 0.8 to 1.5. Walnut is about 0.6+-. Old Forester

[Geoff Whaling]

OO for sure. Was once planted all over the prairie for living fences. Once only found along the Red river in Tex. and Oakl. There was a thriving business selling and shipping wagon loads of seed to desperate cow people and hence the now large range. They required pruning to keep the thorns low to the ground. Then came along this horrible stuff called barbed wire. Such is technology. It is what Foresters call a "lost tropical" along with Mullberry, Catalps, Black and Honey locust and others. Evolved in the tropics and were able to thrive in our colder midlatitude climates. There are others that have been introduced but these were here on their own. PS-- ring width is a product of abundant sunlight and can change in the same tree. Like most tropicals it has large showy flowers/fruit, large leaves and often very hard and durable wood. Many have specific gravities of 0.8 to 1.5. Walnut is about 0.6+-. Old Forester

Looks like OO to me as we get it here in Australia as well.

Interesting this came up as I was researching OO in Australia a little while back. This is a quote from a heritage listing of an OO fence in NSW at Peats Crater

"Hedges were the dominant form of fence used in Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and although a few were planted in Australia, they were never common except in northern Tasmania. Osage Orange was the favoured hedge plant in the prairie states of the United States before the invention of barbed wire in 1874. Some colonial Australian nurserymen and others praised the plant for fences, but by the 1860s the de facto standard fence in Australia was post-and-wire.

The hedge in Peats Crater is a highly significant historic heritage item , satisfying multiple heritage criteria at such a level as to be considered of State significance. Hedges were a technological dead-end in the Australian colonies. They were never common in rural NSW, and any that survive, either as boundary markers or as fences, are rare today. This example demonstrates one approach to marking boundaries. (Criterion a). The hedge combines British fencing technology (hedges) of the 18th and 19th centuries with the most widely used hedge plant in the USA in the 19th century before the invention of barbed wire in 1874."

[Geoff Whaling]

A handy test for you

"One helpful characteristic that can help separate it from lookalikes such as Mulberry (http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/mulberry/) or Black Locust (http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/black-locust/) (besides being heavier) is that Osage Orange contains a water-soluble yellow dye, so putting shavings into water will turn the water yellow."

http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/osage-orange/

[Malcolm McLeod]

Even easier ID is from the fruit - - bright green, large (size of a large naval orange or small grapefruit), with surface texture much like an orange, 'tho not a true skin. Hold on to a few. Toss in a closet. Bugs hate them (per my grandparents).

Squirrels will leave a 3 lb pile of shavings trying to gnaw their way to the kernel (hopefully, not the ones you put in the closet!).

My aunt's N. central Texas house is 75-80 years old and still sits on Bois D'Arc (OO) blocks. Which sit on the bare ground.

[Mel Fulks]

But there are male and female plants with OO. So a male plant might be denied his identity by the fruit standard.

[Alan Arnup]

A subdivision of land a few miles from me required 27 Osage Orange trees to be cut down and subsequently mulched. The landowner lost my number after promising to keep me some. A few months later he found it and said he had kept me a little of it. I still have quite a few blocks of the original trailer load - it is as hard as concrete to turn but gives a magnificent result. See attached pic. of a completed lidded bowl I made.

Alan