white walnut?

[rocky brown]

i got a couple of pieces of walnut from mike- aka Walnuts- a few months ago and just got around to re-sawing it, and the inside is very pale. is this normal for walnut and will it darken over time or do i need to try and stain it?

thanks for any info,
rb

ps. mike is a great guy to do business with!

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

I have had walnut like that. It's from a Black Walnut tree. That goofy coloration is why I prefer English Walnut. But the latter is hard to get.

I have never seen it change color and darken.

[Peter Quinn]

Might be you were given a piece of butternut that was steamed with some walnut, I've seen that before. Might be your board came from the outside of the tree and most of it is sap wood, which is much lighter than heartwood in walnut.

Took a class with a finisher who used water based dyes layered in different colors using the color wheel to 'nuetralize' walnut sap. Looked pretty good when he was done. This was an inch of sap on the outside edge of a board, don't know about matching a whole board.

[Travis Gauger]

Sounds like you got some sapwood. It will be real hard to match it to the darker grain in your heartwood though.

[Wade Lippman]

Below is a picture of a walnut box on a butternut table. Both have BLO on them.
http://www.frontiernet.net/~toller/walnut.jpg
There is actual white walnut; the sapwood of unsteamed walnut is quite white. I have used it for accent on walnut pieces. Looks nothing like butternut, or black walnut for that matter.

[Peter Quinn]

I have encountered an occasional piece of butternut steamed with and dried with black walnut at a commercial processor (a few odd pieces here and there), and it readily takes on that purplish color. It can be quite deceiving at first glance in the rough. The color in black walnut is a powerful stain. While the grain pattern is similar butternut tends to be quite a bit lighter in weight, and looses that color quickly when processed as it is only a surface stain and its natural color is as shown in the picture above.

Black walnut sapwood readily stains to an even looking dark color in the rough when steamed with other dark boards. It can also be quite deceiving. Again, re-sawing or a few passes through a planer exposes unstained material who's light to white color is much different. I have seen one face dark brown and the other grey/white after milling.

I think the grading standards for FAS black walnut are in their own category due to relative scarcity. Sap is allowed, as are many other knots and defects. Walnut does not darken with age, but actually lightens considerably. It will be difficult to stain heartwood and sapwood so they will continue to match in the future.

[rocky brown]

i talked to mike and he thinks it's probably butternut. it's a pretty wood- just not dark enough for what i wanted to use it for on this particular project. i'll save it for another day. mike offered to replace it- he is great to work with!

rb

[Brian Kent]

Does Walnut sapwood have the same properties as heartwood (hardness and flex?)

[Michael Hammers]

Your probably seeing the sapwood. It gets milky white and from my limited expierience it seems more prevalent in air dried walnut, could be off on that though.

[Lee Schierer]

As others have said, the sap wood or new growth wood on walnut is quite light in color. It will never darken with age. There are stains called sap wood stains that will staini it. My father had a can of it that he used to touch up small areas of sap wood. You can also mix your own stains to make the color match. I would not recommend this on surfaces tha will be out in the open, but those inside a cabinet can be stained.

[Peter Quinn]

Brian...In my experience (building passage doors professionally) walnut sapwood is best avoided for parts where stability is critical and in pieces where color must match when exposed to light. The sap often suffers unpredictable movement issues.

For example I was often allowed (required?) to use boards where one face was heartwood, one face was 70% sap or better for closet doors, where one face would rarely be seen. Looking at the end or edge grain you could see the dividing line between heart and sap clearly, it looked like a sandwich of two different woods. It was sold to the customer as 'country walnut' if sap occured on a visable face and used only per their approval.

The shop was relatively climate controlled, not perfect but decent. All wood was checked for moisture content. In the initial stages of a large job I would flatten rails and styles (80" styles), plane over thickness (allowing for further flattening as needed), then sticker while proceeding with jointery/shaping setup. Most of the heartwood only pieces in walnut remained very flat for days or weeks on large jobs, the pieces with heavy sap/some heartwood invariable had considerable movement when subjected to the same environmental conditions as the heartwood, sometimes bowing to the point of uselessness. They steam the sapwood to equalize the color and stabilize its movement, but steaming is only marginally effective.

As far as hardness we never conducted scientific tests but my thumbnail impressions suggest it is a bit softer and noticably lighter in weight. I don't have any experience bending it either with steam or lamination techniques.

In a class with Peter Gedrys (finisher in this months FWW) on coloration techniques he was able to make walnut sapwood disappear before my eyes using water based dyes and tinted shellac sealer. Probably not a good idea for parts with direct sunlight exposure. He described a technique to me using A-B bleach to remove all color, then dyeing and staining to introduce even color. He called it 'Antique walnut' and it closely approximated the washed out brown color that older walnut pieces take on. I have yet to try this myself as A-B bleach is a rather nasty thing, but his 10yr old sample boards looked great.

[Josiah Bartlett]

I have quite a lot of black walnut I salvaged and milled from local urban trees. The sap wood is not stable at all, and machines quite differently from heartwood. However, it does tend to make really neat color variation in turned forms. I have a couple of bowls I gave out as gifts that I turned out of pieces that had interesting grain and mixed sap and hardwood. You have to keep your tools really sharp to keep it from tearing out and it seems to turn better when mostly dry, but it provides nice contrast. I wouldn't use it for anything larger than a salad bowl, though, it tends to move around quite a bit.

[Brian Kent]

Thanks for your experience, Peter and Josiah. I will avoid using them structurally together or where even color is important.

I am about to make a frame saw (Tools for Working Wood plan). I will probably end up using pecan. But I also have a couple of walnut branches that were hanging over my yard a year ago. They are about 3" thick and all sapwood. I may try to shape their innards into a frame saw and see what happens.