What Type Of Wood

[Joseph N. Myers]

I was asked to get this slab wood ready for a table top and was wondering what type of wood it is. It is suppose to be from the Pacific Northwest, 2" thick, 4-1/2' by 18" and about 32 lbs/cu ft. It is hard, closed grain, sands great and takes stain well.

Looks like Catalpa as far as location and weight but is not soft like catalpa (at least that is what the book says). BTW, alaska and aromatic cedar, butternut and alder are around the same weight.

Following is a picture of the front and back.

100_0137b.jpg

100_0136b.jpg


TIA, Joe

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Have you sanded or sawed & smelled it??
From the photo it might be black walnut.
But then Black Walnut is weird stuff. My harvested BW is often an unappealing light gray.

[Joseph N. Myers]

Have you sanded or sawed & smelled it??
From the photo it might be black walnut.
But then Black Walnut is weird stuff. My harvested BW is often an unappealing light gray.

Cliff,

I have already planed it and belt sanded it to 120. No smell to it. Not black walnut - I have 2,000+ bf of it plus some 20 walnut slabs so that part I know. Besides, black walnut is something like 40 lbs/cu ft.

Grain is real tight, something like red oak. Stained a piece of cutoff with Bush Oil (something like Watco), natural, and it did turn fairly dark, much darker than what I expected.

Does have a live edge but there was no bark so that didn't help.

Regards, Joe

[Tom Spallone]

Does it matter?

[Michael Adelong]

Whatever it is, I would use the L shaped mirror trick to find a nice pattern to make a veneer table top with. glue 2 mirrors together at 90 degrees. Be sure to get them as close to square as possible. Then, slide it around on your board until you see the table top you want to make. Mark the inside of the mirror with a pencil, and then you can flip the mirror over and use it to draw the other 2 sides.

I saw David Marks do that with a piece of wood about 1' square, which he resawed into 4 slices, and then unfolded 4 ways to make a 2' square pattern. He applied the veneer to some MDF. It looked incredible.

Parts of your board look very interesting. You might have some really cool kaleidoscope patterns hiding in there.

Michael

[Steve Cox]

My initial guess would be maple. The color is wrong but looking at the slabs there is unusual color and figure for just about any wood up here. Our local maple is called "big leaf" in both English and Latin (Acer Macrophyllum). It is considerably darker than hard maple and I have seen similar figure to what your slabs are.

[Charles Bruno]

Joseph,
It looks like a type of walnut that grows in northern CA and the pacific north west. Its called Claro Walnut I've seen some furniture made from it and it looks like the slabs in your pictures

[Steve Cox]

Charles,
Now why didn't I think of that? I think it looks a little light for Claro although like I said before it's dark for maple. I guess it depends on the lighting in the shop where the picture was taken.

[Jim Becker]

I was also going to suggest Claro Walnut...which is, if I recall accurately...and I could be wrong...a graft of Black Walnut rootstock with English Walnut "up top".