Antique Lumber ID

[ShawnE Curry]

These used to be floor boards in an attic crawl space of an 1870's farm house (my sister's). I think it's some really great stuff - nice wide boards, some with live edges (possibly sawn on site from the same tree?), and great patina. I plan to use them mostly as-is, but I'm curious to know what species they might be. I'm also curious about the saw marks on the boards, and whether they reveal hints as to how they might have been sawn. I jointed an edge on one of the boards (I don't want to surface plane them) just to see if I could figure out what it was myself, but I'm not sure. I have a guess, but I don't want that to color any of your opinions, so I won't reveal it just yet.

Thanks in advance!
-Shawn

[John Schweikert]

Hard to tell, photos are fuzzy. That edge you planed looks like douglas fir but not sure about the flecks.

[Peter Quinn]

Where was the house, how heavy is the lumber? Last winter I started processing a butt load of antique lumber searching for all the "chestnut" that was in there, because the architect who had an old barn taken apart was sure it was all chestnut based on observing the rough highly oxidized heavily stained old timbers and boards. I didn't find find much chestnut....some, but also red oak, white oak, eastern pine, ash and lots of "who knows". Based on those photos and my previous experience I'm confident at this point it's "some old brown boards"! To be more specific requires more information, and maybe cleaning up a face, edges can be deceiving or unenlightening.

[John K Jordan]

You can get free professional and accurate wood ID by sending samples to the government forest products laboratory. Some info here:
http://www.wood-database.com/contact-form/
The government lab will ID five samples a year for any US citizen. My experience is they are quite good.

BTW, wood ID is a hobby of mine. I use razor blades, magnifiers, microscopes, scales, UV light, and my sense of smell. Some types of wood are distinctive and very easy to make a positive ID. Bark on any edges can also be a good clue. The location is also a clue for old rough-sawn wood since boards were usually cut from local species.

Without looking at rings and pore and rays and such with a magnifier, by posting photos of the boards you will get nothing but guesses, some based on experience, some perhaps right, but still guesses. Many, many species can look the same in a photo even on a freshly planed face since the figure and color can vary widely even within the same tree. Quarter sawn vs flat sawn can also make a huge difference in appearance. The darkening of age and effects of environment makes ID even more of a guess.

JKJ

[Dave Cullen]

The pictures are awful.

[ShawnE Curry]

The house is located in Western New York, about 5 miles south of the Lake Ontario shoreline. There's also an old barn (needs to come down) with a lot of great hand-hewn timbers; which also leads me to believe that a lot of this lumber came from on-site. Back in the 1920's and 30's, most of the land was apple and peach orchard. So the original timber is probably all gone, but it's now dominated by maple, ash, cherry, aspen, locust, and red pine. The wood felt rather light to me, so my first thought was pine, but the knots seem too random. The red pine that grows here now tends to have "rings" of knots.

"Old brown boards" is fine by me. I really like the look of it as is - sorry I couldn't get better pics. Thanks to everyone who left helpful comments. I think I will take a section from the one that split and try to clean up a face of that. I'll also look into the expert identification.

For the folks who didn't like my fuzzy pics, (at least they actually showed up this time!) here's a couple more. This is all lumber that I milled this summer and fall with my Alaskan chainsaw mill. All of it grew on mine or my sister's property. Black Walnut, White Ash, Hard Maple, Red Maple, Red Pine, and Black Locust.

[Michael Zerance]

That's a nice pile of lumber you have there.

[Peter Quinn]

Now THAT looks like a nice pile of wood Shawn. I'm looking at the original pics on a bigger screen now, the edge grain shot has the look of pine, I'm still pretty sure those are old brown boards. The weight pretty much rules out locust, ash, maple, oak, pretty sure its not walnut,

[John McClanahan]

I'm no expert, but I agree the planed edge grain looks like pine.


John

[Tom M King]

Planed edge is definitely Pine, but not sure which type. The saw marks are very uniform and perfectly parallel, so some sort of powered mill.

[Allan Speers]

Those fuzzy pics look like Chestnut to me. (The very rare "Fuzzy Chestnut" species. )

The planed piece is a hair too yellow, but does Pine have those flecks? It could be Cypress.

How light is it?

[ShawnE Curry]

I found a section with no metal in it, and ran it through the planer tonight. I believe it's the very rare chestnut pine.

[Jerry Olexa]

You are fortunate!!! Nice stash of quality old wood.

[Mike Heidrick]

Fuzzy chestnut pine really is beautiful. Congrats!

[Dave Zellers]

So... how much do you want for the left half of that board?