Wood ID help, take a shot at it

I scavenged this wood from a shipping pallet about 10 years ago and ran across it while doing some housecleaning in my wood storage area. It has a slightly greenish/yellow hue, beautiful curl figure as you can see and when cut, smells like sweaty underwear. The end grain looks pretty diffuse to me, and as I recall, there were other boards on the pallet that did not have the curl figure. I believe it was a domestic pallet. Attachment 398821Attachment 398821Attachment 398821Attachment 398822Attachment 398822 Sorry for the repeat images and disconnected text, I'm not sure what I did.

I’m going with curly maple.

The color and end grain reminds me more of sycamore that I’ve used, but I have never seen it have that kind of curl.

Sycamaple?

Nice find.

Figure sure looks like curly Maple but to pourous rings and voids dont. Im going with some sort of fast growing tropical cane-like tree. Have no idea what that is but I dont think its any domestic.

This page with curly maple examples shows some end grain.

I can't see any ring porosity in Jon's photo.

could be box elder, it's stinky....

I'm not thinking it's in the maple family, it does not look like the curly maple stash I have and it's considerably lighter than soft maple. My first impression was poplar because of the color, but I've not seen poplar with that pronounced a curl figure. And the smell is powerful, my wife was disgusted with the odor when she visited my shop 15 minutes after I sliced the end off the board on the SCMS and this is after a decade's worth of air drying. Perhaps Mark B has it right.
Thanks for the input, feel free to add on.

The smell may be the clue...the only thing I've had that had a similar smell was elm. Poplar has a clean smell to it. Maple almost no smell. But from a pallet, it could have come from somewhere else in the world, too, which could make it harder to identify exactly. So I would just call it "beautiful wood" and make something with it!

You can always send a sample to the Forest Products Lab and they will tell you for sure.

https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/research/c...dfactsheet.php

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Originally Posted by Jim Becker

....So I would just call it "beautiful wood" and make something with it!

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And if someone asks,
Attachment 398947

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jim Becker

The smell may be the clue...the only thing I've had that had a similar smell was elm.

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Not to suggest that this is the answer to the OP's question, but I've always thought oak smells like sweat or urine.

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Originally Posted by Gary Ragatz

Not to suggest that this is the answer to the OP's question, but I've always thought oak smells like sweat or urine.

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That would be red oak.

Cottonwood has a funky smell, and it is about the right color.

Pics aren’t the best, but I’m going with curly maple cut with dull blades.