Stock wood

[Jim Kibler]

I got my hands on some pretty fantastic curly maple the other day from up in Michigan.  Pretty fantastic I’d say!

[Kmcmichael]

Wow!

[jrb]

they just about leave ya speechless, so amazing

[tunadawg]

Sweet!

[sbowman]

Nice, you get north of Claire and there is more maple than in the entire state of Ohio  LOL, Mostly if not all red,  What you got should be nice and dense too.

Steve

[t.caster]

Yowsuh!

[Dwshotwell]

If there’s one thing we can grow up here it’s nice stands of maple. I’ve got 20 acres of them. We select cut 12 years ago and they harvested several veneer - grade logs. I wish I’d been into muzzle loaders at the time. Next time maybe I’ll keep a log.

[Jim Kibler]

Up until recently, we’ve gotten most of our wood from Pennsylvania.  Recently we’ve been getting more from Michigan and it’s been good.  I find it interesting how wood grown in different areas can have such different characteristics. 

A good example is the stuff Freddie Harrison cut in Western Tennessee.  Generally nice and hard with finer curl.  You would never guess this from TN.

Same thing goes comparing Pennsylvania wood to Michigan.  In general the Michigan stuff seems a little harder and on average a little finer curl. 

Jim

[Cody Tetachuk]

Question, how do "they" determine the curl quality/quantity prior to cutting the tree down or is it just a "lets cut this one and see what we get" sort of proposition?.

[oldtravler61]

   Jim several years ago. I bought up some Michigan maple for gun stocks.
  Excellent curl and hard. The fellow I bought it from was going to use it for firewood. He charged me $40 bucks for it. Price of a cord of wood, so keep looking it's out their.... and cheap...!!!!

[Frank]

Very nice wood Jim. You are going to force me to buy a Woodsrunner when this wood is cut into stocks.

[Jim Kibler]

Question, how do "they" determine the curl quality/quantity prior to cutting the tree down or is it just a "lets cut this one and see what we get" sort of proposition?.

Great question.  First look just under the bark and look for a rippled or washboard surface.  You can see this in some of the live edge surfaces shown in the photo.  Depending on the time of the year, the bark will often slip or fall off easily.  During the winter it’s more tightly adhered.  Log handling equipment often breaks off some of the bark, so this helps.

If the surface below the bark shows good promise, the next thing to do is to cut a cookie or slice from the small end of the log.  You can then break this to see the intensity and how deep in the log the curl goes.  The small end is chosen, since logs often have compression curl near the roots, but this doesn’t usually extend very high.

Jim

[Bill Raby]

That is going to make some nice guns.

[Jim Kibler]

Forgot to mention that looking at the grain of splits and tears along the log can be helpful too.  If it’s curly, the split surface will be wavy too.

On super curly logs, you can sometimes see indications through the bark. 

Finally, I’ve been told that the curliest of trees will have wavy grain clear out to the twigs.  I even have heard stories of people trying to identify curly standing trees by breaking off twigs and inspecting.