Wood Quiz - What'd I Get?

[Battenkiller]

Just got a load of rounds and big splits delivered. How much is there, and what is it? Pics are huge so you can see the wood grain.


Tell me how I did for $65. Full size bed that was actually bowed out a bit on the sides from carrying too much wood in the past. They unloaded about 10 small rounds off the back by the time I took this shot.

ID#1

ID#2

ID#3

Load piled on ground except for the row of lighter colored wood in the background I had them stack on top of last year's wood.

 

[iskiatomic]

OK I'll bite. Choke cherry it looks like to me.


KC

 

[smokinj]

I will go with white oak

 

[LLigetfa]

Cherry, Silver Maple, Ash and Spruce.

 

[golfandwoodnut]

cherry, maple, ash and little oak

 

[woodsmaster]

Looks like a good mix of wood. $65.00 don't sound like a bad deal, being delivered. I see oak, maple, and I believe cherry.

 

[mayhem]

$65 for a half cord bucked and unsplit. Market rate, maybe a bit of a deal.

Good looking wood.

 

[billb3]

I see cherry, maybe some oak, the one I don't recognize at all must be ash.
Especially ID#1 - except in extreme bottom left - that looks like a piece of 10 to 15 year old dreaded white pine.

 

[Battenkiller]

$65 for a half cord bucked and unsplit. Market rate, maybe a bit of a deal.

Good looking wood.

It was advertised as a "healthy half cord". He went on to say that his half cords are about two face cord. I'll know better when it gets split and stacked, but the truth is probably somewhere in between. It's bucked 18-20", so a 4' high stack 12' long is all I could ask for.


Just about everybody got the cherry correct, but that's it. No oak at all, no maple of any sort, no spruce, no pine (only a few pieces of ash that look more like pine in a photo).

Top photo is black locust. Middle photo is, of course, cherry. Bottom is shagbark hickory. There are a few small rounds of ash, but they are limb wood and don't have the characteristic thick, furrowed bark yet, so they are hard to ID in a photo. The only one visible in the photos is the one in the lower left corner of the first photo with the locust. As someone noted, it looks a bit like pine.

All told, a fair load and a decent mix. The cherry put together with the hickory and locust give it about the BTU content of a load of straight red oak (which is what he wanted to sell me but I didn't want any) but with a much shorter drying time. Still, I'm going to try to get the guy down to $55/truck if I am going to buy a dozen of them. I pay $150 for a "healthy" cord of c/s/d hardwood right now. Ain't worth hand-splitting it myself for less than $40/cord.

 

[LLigetfa]

We don't have Hickory around here but we have Black Spruce that has a flakey bark and dark interior. I don't see anything that looks like Pine in those pics. I certainly never confused Ash with Pine.

 

[golfandwoodnut]

I am not seeing black locust.

 

[oldspark]

I am not seeing black locust.

The black locust is the pinkish looking splitts. Never mind I am confused, the cherry sort of looks like black locust when it is split, pictures of wood are some times a little off color wise.

 

[Battenkiller]

I am not seeing black locust.

The black locust is the pinkish looking splitts. Never mind I am confused, the cherry sort of looks like black locust when it is split, pictures of wood are some times a little off color wise.

On the IDs, it's becoming obvious to me that it's very hard to ID wood from a photo. It's plain as day what you got when you have the goods in your hands and in front of your face. I tried to get both bark and split shots that were representative of the typical ones you'd encounter with these species. The color in the photos is spot on to what these pieces looks like outside in the daylight, or at least it is on my monitor. I thought they were all gimmes, but apparently, photos can stump even experienced folk.

Plus, there are regional differences in wood. For example, black locust in my area always has that ring of light colored sapwood around a pale brown heartwood that has just a hint of green in it, not yellow or orange like some folks have posted. And the bark is unmistakable in person, as well as its distinctive funny odor. The first shot may look like ash to some, but if I had you here with some real ash to compare it with you would have no doubt. If I get a chance tomorrow, I'll split a piece of locust and one of ash and take some good macro shots of the end and side grain. Very different looking.


I was hoping some clear shots with positive IDs would go a long way toward helping newbies ID their wood. Now I'm not so sure. There are so many clues to a wood's species that don't come across in a photo. Now, when they can digitize smell and heft... ;-)

 

[WOODBUTCHER]

ID#1 probably poplar or cottonwood Judging by the "huge" size of the growth rings....not sure, I don't see much of it....but I'll bet when its seasoned it will feel like picking up cardboard.

But I do hack through quite a bit of the rest......
I'm 100% positive ID#2 Black Cherry and ID #3 Is ShagBark Hickory.
That Hickory is heavy ain't it ?

WoodButcher

 

[Battenkiller]

ID#1 probably poplar or cottonwood Judging by the "huge" size of the growth rings....not sure, I don't see much of it....but I'll bet when its seasoned it will feel like picking up cardboard.

Not poplar or cottonwood.

Just went out to split a piece. Already down to 34% MC in the center of the round and still heavy as hell! Definitely black locust. You can clearly see the pores, and the yellowish cast to the heartwood. The wide rings? Well, locust is one of the fastest growing hardwoods there is.

Here's a couple shots of the ash as well. There were some rounds of ash that were beginning to show that familiar furrowed bark, but I picked this one because it's so deceptive. The bark almost looks like maple or beech, but the split tells no such lies. Ash is a ring porous wood, and in the end grain shot you can see the open ring structure at the division of each ring. Maples and beech are diffuse porous woods, and they don't have those pronounced bands of pores in the end grain. No visible heartwood at all in this piece, either, which is very typical of ash limb wood in these parts.