Telling the difference

[TinStar]

How does one tell the difference between hard sugar maple and the softer red maple by appearance alone? There is a sawmill in my area that sells maple in sizes large enough for a blank; and it is seasoned.

TinStar

[Larry Luck]

TinStar,

I built my first rifle in red maple and it was plenty hard. 

If you can't dent it with your thumbnail it would probably be hard enough for a rifle stock.  Red maple can also have pretty bold figure. 

If you can handle the wood, you should be able to pick a decent piece.  Density is also a factor, and I generally think heavy equals hard, but maybe not always.
As to telling the difference without handling the wood, others will have to answer that one.

Good luck

Larry Luck

[Simon]

Beware red maple sap wood.  I have a piece that has lots of stripe, so I decided to use it.  It is soft and stringy, very difficult to get a neat inlet.  I would not use it again .

[D. Taylor Sapergia]

Almost ALL of any maple tree is sap wood.  The heart wood is darker and harder, and much smaller in the tree.  maple is a "white wood" - sap wood.

There is soft, spongy, unsuitable wood in all of maple's varieties. 

[rich pierce]

Density if it's kiln dried.  When examining cut out blanks of the same size, I heft them.  Heaviest one wins.

[Acer Saccharum]

With some sugar maple logs, I have seen just a 3" rime of white sapwood surrounding a great big heartwood section.
On other logs, the heart is very small in proportion to the rest of the diameter, which is white sapwood.

Go figure.

In any event, if you are going to stain the wood, the difference in color is not an issue.

[D. Taylor Sapergia]

I agree Tom.  I've made many rifles in which there were areas of heart wood on the predominantly white wood.  Once stained, it's nearly impossible to see which was which.  The heartwood is almost always harder than the sapwood.

[billd]

Don't shoot me for this one.....This past spring I was at Wayne Dunlop's shop with Daniel.  I was pulling blanks from his pile asking him if they were red or sugar. Daniel would hold them with the butt end about 2 or 3 inches from the concrete floor and bounce them a few times. He said the only sure way he had was by the sound and that is how he sorted the blanks I bought.

Bill

[jimrbto]

I can remember that the quality of the wood depended on the trees growing conditions. Hilltop trees tended to be very slow growing and very dense while just the opposite for trees grown lower with more water. When possible count the growth rings/inch.

[northmn]

Look at growth rings and figure.  Alos consider the build.  A plain rifle will handle red maple quite well, but it is somwhat soft for carving.  I built a rifle out of red maple for my wife many years ago and swore I was working in pine but it did turn out and I still have it.  Even did a little carving on it.

DP

[woodsrunner]

OK. If I can remember correctly what Dr. Hamilton taught us in Wood Tech class 43 years ago (God but I'm getting old!), here are a few basics that we can think about when selecting stock blanks: (I'm talking about hardwoods and not conifers, and north of about latitude 20 degrees).

1. Wood strength is correlated with the percent of springwood to summerwood. When the tree breaks dormancy in the spring and initiates growth, the springwood cells are laid down first. These cells are larger in diameter than the later summerwood cells, and are weaker in strength. Therefore, the higher the percentage of springwood cells to summerwood cells, the weaker the wood and vice versa. A 10 power hand lens will show you the difference in these cells.

2. The higher the percentage of springwood to summerwood, the more stable the sawn lumber will be. While density will be greater with thick walled summerwood cells, so too will the potential for warpage of sawn lumber ie stock blanks. The denser the wood, though, the stronger it is per cubic increment of measure. So in effect it can be a trade-off....strength or possible warping. However! If hardwood is properly dried and seasoned, warping should be almost non-existing. The danger lies in poorly kiln dried hardwood blanks or lumber, and believe me....kiln drying hardwoods is more than an art and a science! The man who operates the kiln with hardwood is the most important man in the lumber manufacturing operation!

3. The color differentation between sapwood and heartwood is caused by food storage within the tree. Food material is manufactured within the leaves and transfered down to the root system where it is stored for next years' growth. As a tree ages the crown-the leaves-manufacture more food material than the roots can store, so the excess is transfered to the cells making up the woody part of the trunk. This transfer is made through a system of cells called "storied ray cells" which run from the living portion of the tree just under the bark to the very center or heart of the tree. As the tree ages more food material is deposited and the color changes to a darker color. The lighter sap wood is simply the newer wood or cells, and hasn't filled up with food material yet.

4. IIRC the "curl" that we all want in our stocks is caused by the food material within the storied ray cells being transfered to the interior cells. These cells are at right angles to the other up and down oriented cells, and are full of darker food material and stand out when the log is sawn. Usually age determines the amount of curl, but not always so even with younger trees it can be seen. But usually curl is much more common in older ones.

Newer information may have developed since I was exposed to wood tech and there may be different opinions on this now. But this info should be about right I think.

[billd]

Wow Woodsrunner, After 43 years you can remember all that? After 37 years I can barely remember my shop teachers name.  It was a great post, wish I had your memory.

Bill

[caliber45]

Hey, Woodsrunner -- I, too, am impressed with your memory. And thanks for the explanation of curl. I was led to believe it had to do with wind and stress on the tree. Silly me. And, too, silly me for listening to my "counselors" while in school, who urged me to take all the math and science I could get my hands on, and leave all those shop classes to the Indiana farm kids. Haven't used all that math and science at all, but I sure wish I'd taken some wood shop and machine shop . . . -- paulallen, tucson

[Karl Kunkel]

I was always taught that curl was a recessive genetic trait. But also occurs due to wind stress and crotches.  I know the knowledge rests here within this forum.

[Dave B]

I was talking with Freddie Harrison at the CLA show a number of years ago and he shared with us a story of a fellow who kept asking if it was hard maple every time he picked up a blank. The guy would then bite the end of the stock to test the hardness leaving teeth marks in the wood. After about ten stocks Freddie was irked and told him that the way he tested them was by urinating on the wood blanks. The guy didn't bite any more wood.

[Otter]

Gee, woodsrunner . . . I can't even remember what I had for breakfast two days ago . . . way to go!!! Excellent info.

[Bioprof]

There's a pretty good discussion of how to tell the difference here:

http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:GY0LOMR-OpwJ:www.finewoodworking.com/FWNPDF/011085073.pdf+sugar+maple+red+maple+difference+rays&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESggEX0sUJ7TZ6Xe437FM0SsQ5n7TcNmS6BqmQcmmYaArgni8zvJnJ7_6DbR0bIzQ37V7lYJftYx-KFlYUoRkYq8ocCp75agLCF6LtKwfR_LSwDUKB612y_Us66El70Z1wRPT-Sm&sig=AFQjCNFYErlCz7ofv259b1ZMmMPh3Jj7TQ

When ferrous sulfate is added to red maple, it turns bluish-black, when ferrous sulfate is added to sugar maple, it turns green.   This may account for some of the differences in the results of staining with aquafortis.

[Benedict]

If the blank is hard and has good grain layout, does it make a difference what species it is?

Bruce

[Swampwalker]

I must respectfully disagree with Woodsrunner on point 4 - the curl is a growth characteristic, not directly related to food storage.  If you split a piece of curly maple, the face of the split, following the grain, is wavy, regardless of color.  What we see when we stain the maple is the differential absorption of the stain by the different grain orientations at the finished surface.

[t.caster]

I'm with swampwalker on that!

[Stophel]

I believe it has been determined that curl is genetic.  Some do it, some don't.