Wood Species ID?

[Jason Dean]

While visiting my folks over Christmas, I rescued some shorts from my Dad's packaged kindling. Most of it was easy to ID, but the lower piece in this photo has me stumped:

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Its fairly hard and has a yellowish hue that doesn't quite come through in the pictures.

Any thoughts?

[Allan Hill]

Looks like walnut to me. Does it smell like walnut?

[Matt Evans]

Looks like a light walnut to me, but it's difficult to say from a picture. I've gotten walnut that has a yellowish brown tint plenty of times when I buy 1&2 common for secondary wood or rails and stiles. I might have a couple pieces right now. I'll check tomorrow.

[Jason Dean]

I had not thought to try smelling it. The top piece in the photo is walnut and smells like it. But the mystery piece doesn't smell. Its heavier than the walnut as well.

End grain picture if it helps (unknown wood on the left):

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[Warren Mickley]

I would guess persimmon, Diospyros virginiana. A dense wood, very hard, with fine texture and a tendency to streaky color.

[Bill McCarthy]

I really have no experience in this area, so I probably shouldn't say anything. To me, it looks like a picture I recently saw that was supposed to be elm.

[John K Jordan]

While visiting my folks over Christmas, I rescued some shorts from my Dad's packaged kindling. Most of it was easy to ID, but the lower piece in this photo has me stumped:
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Its fairly hard and has a yellowish hue that doesn't quite come through in the pictures.
Any thoughts?

Have you tried taking a close look at the end grain? If you shave a small section with a single-edged razor blade or a very sharp knife you can look at it with a hand lens and compare it with photos. The pores in persimmon, for example, look very different from those of oak, walnut, sweet gum, etc. BTW, sweet gum is another wood that has colored streaks but it is relatively light in weight. But wood varies so widely from local conditions that you can't always rely on the streaks or even the color. For example, I have some dogwood that has yellow and pink streaks, unusual for dogwood.

This is persimmon end grain. Does yours look similar?
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You can find this and end grain photos of other species at the Wood Database.

Their article on Wood ID will explain how to examine the end grain. http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/wood-identification-guide/
That article will also tell you how to get free wood identification from the US Government.

Sometimes it is very difficult or impossible to identify a piece of unknown wood even by the end grain. What it often IS easy to do is eliminate candidates. For example, if a wood has a band of large open pores at the beginning of each ring, it can't possibly be a diffuse porous wood like cherry!

BTW, there is another thing you can do to eliminate some species: measure and weigh the piece. From that you can get the density. For example, Persimmon averages 52 lbs per cubic foot. If your piece measures 40, it is probably not persimmon. (BTW, I'm not implying that I have reason to think it is NOT persimmon - I'm just using that as an example.) Black Walnut is about 38 lbs/cu ft. You can get these numbers from a table or from the individual species entries in the Wood Database.

JKJ

JKJ