What kind of wood is this?
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Wood and Wood Preparation / What kind of wood is this?
- This topic has 12 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 10 months ago by Dragomir Dikov.
-
AuthorPosts
-
1 April 2017 at 9:40 pm #310790
I’m no expert, but it looks like curly cherry to me. Can you take a picture of the end grain as well?
Does where you acquired the wood give any clues? Did you purchase it, find it, salvage it? It looks like the first pass was against the grain – was the second pass a jointer with the grain which smoothed it out?
Zooming it I can’t tell if that is tearout or if it looks like sapele. A closer picture would be helpful
- This reply was modified 7 years ago by Spencer Gaskins.
- This reply was modified 7 years ago by Spencer Gaskins.
2 April 2017 at 6:48 am #310794Really hard to say with the one pivture. To have a chance a flat grain, cross grain, and end grain shot would be helpful. The endgrain shot should be a closeup of a well planed surface so we can see the vessels, ray, and grain.
Also three shots of the wood wetted with alcohol or mineral spirits..
First pass is Khaya, but it’s more of a wild stab.
Hi,
I’ll take some more photos and post them later on.
The wood was salvaged from a 30 year old table (factory produced). The top was some sort of MDF veneered to look like mahogany, but the legs and assembly look like hardwood. That’s what the photo is of.
As far as I can tell, there were two distinct types of wood used in the leg assembly. The photo above is of the main cross member between the legs. The legs themselves are different again.
I’m going to run them all through my planer, and assuming it works out I will get some more photos.
Thanks
Darren.
4 April 2017 at 5:41 am #310857Hi Darren,
The end grain rings look to me to exclude Utile, Sapele, and Mahogany. Does it smell kind of like cedar when you planed it?
Just curious – did the table happen to be factory-produced in the Phillippines or Taiwan? A lot of base wood that became veneered over (or turned into plywood…) is Meranti, or Phillippine mahogany, made in the Phillippines.
It looks like the same kind of figure as the broad spectrum of Mahogany-type wood. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I could step in and help better identify.
Spencer
When you ran it through the planer, did it have a notable odor? The walnut I’ve worked with in the past had a very distinct, very pleasant, somewhat spicy fragrance. It looks more like a mahogany to me just looking at the grain but I’m not exactly a tree specialist.
This site may help but you would probably have to “back-in” to the correct answer by looking at many different woods and comparing them to what you have to narrow it down. http://www.wood-database.com/. God, the Internet has everything. Never mind–I see that the poster immediately above me shared results from the same site. Anyway, perhaps it could help.
6 May 2017 at 10:57 am #311749Did you have any luck identifying that wood?
I found the same wood on some old drawer sides that I salvaged from the skip.
Looking at the wood-database I concluded that it might be Silver Birch, but I’m not sure since I’m far from being expert on timber identification (and woodworking in general).
I have used some of it as a sole and fence on a poor man’s rebate plane that I made, and it looks nice after a few coats of boiled linseed oil.
I will try to post some pictures during the weekend to help with identification.
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.