Thread: What timber is this?

Cal, I guess when I say "brittle", I'm comparing it with some white ash I brought home from Canada (Fraxinus americana). I'm sure you would be fine bending thin pieces of F. oxycarpa, particularly using heat, but I would make a small wager it won't take bending or impact as well as the white ash. It's nice enough wood & great for some purposes, but I don't think it would stand up as wheel spokes or tool handles the way white ash does....

And nice work, btw - I envy you instrument-makers, it's the ultimate "fine woodworking", I reckon..

Cheers,

Hi all

I'll throw this out there, but could my mystery timber we think is an Ash be an Elm species, like Chinese Elm? Thanks for your excellent help.SANY0342.jpgSANY0344.jpg

Re bending Claret Ash, I was at the Bathurst Heritage Trail yesterday and a chairmaker from Molong had Windsor bow backs he’d steam bent in Claret Ash.
A species I’d tried to grow here in Sydney but due to no frost it carked it.
H.

Originally Posted by CRaatz

......I'll throw this out there, but could my mystery timber we think is an Ash be an Elm species, like Chinese Elm?...

CRaatz, I don't think it's likely to be Chinese Elm (which is in the same family as Elm, but a different genus, i.e. (Celtis) not Ulmus). I will never bet money on a photograph, but your pics fit much better with Ash. Celtis can look a bit similar to Ash from some angles, but two features give it away.

The first is Celtis is more diffuse-porous, meaning it has pores scattered between the growth rings, with Ash the pores are concentrated in definite rings. Second, Celtis has visible medullary rays, they are very fine & you need to look carefully at a clean-cut end to see them (Celtis is on the right):
Ash & Celtis EG.jpg

You will need to enlarge the pic to see them. The broad pale streaks running through the rings in the Ash example are due to the fiddleback grain in this piece, I didn't have a big block of straight-grained Ash - the block photographed above looks like this on the radial surface:
Curly Ash SG.jpg

From the side, the difference is easy to spot - you can see the "scales" of the medullary rays in the Celtis (top piece), but nothing similar in the Ash:
Ash & Celtis side G.jpg

When you are very familiar with woods, they may be quite easy to tell apart with a high degree of certainty in the hand. Density is a vital clue that photographs can't give us & also any odour given off when sawn or planed - some give off only a very brief flash of a smell when you saw them, but it can be sufficiently characteristic to nail the species instantly (Qld Walnut smells like vomit!). I've several times identified a piece of old, weathered & nondescript wood that I didn't have a clue about the instant I put it over the tablesaw. Of course there are some that have a smell but it's not enough to pin it down - many eucalypts fall into that category - they have a certain generic euc. odour, but that's about as near as you can get....

Whatever, if you call your wood Ash, I doubt anyone could prove otherwise......
Cheers,
Ian