I recently took over my late fathers workshop and have come across several unidentifiable (to me haha) types of wood. I’ve been working with some beautiful planks that I had assumed were Cherry based on the outside color and bark. But it just doesn’t feel like Cherry when i’m working it.. And it doesn’t seem to get dyed or tanned by the sun (I’ve placed it outside under the sun a couple of times and haven’t seen much color change) So what the heck is it???? I’ll post some pics, including the finished look and one beside a spalted maple for comparison. Please help!! I have a bunch more, just struggling on what to tell my clients..
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Pacific Yew -my guess. Are you in Oregon or up that way?
Good guess, but I forgot to mention that i'm in the north east.. It seems to be a hard wood, but could also be a very hard soft wood? I'm pretty stuck
I can't tell from the photo of the end grain what exactly I'm seeing
Is the wood porous or nonporous? Little microscopic dots would be present in a hardwood and not in a softwood. Magnification might be necessary. Resin channels in the endgrain would indicate a softwood. Yew is one of if not the hardest of the softwoods. Harder than many hardwoods. About 1500 on the janka scale. Walnut is about 1000. There are eastern varieties as well as European and Asian, maybe everywhere. Because of how and where it grows and it's tendency to rot away in its center it isn't commercially available much. It's difficult to get any kind of large pieces. Turners and carvers like yew and particularly burl pieces.
So, if you can determine that it's a softwood then I'll stick with yew, if it's a hardwood then I'm wrong.
Cherry
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Gulfstar I have tremendous respect for your skill and knowledge, but that bark is not like any cherry tree I have ever seen.
I don't like to definitively identify woods from pictures on websites I'm viewing on a cell phone, but I would throw Northern Pecan into the mix based on the bark and the high contrast between heart and sapwood. It's also know for growing gnarly with with odd bumps and voids, like what I see in your pics. Pecan is often lumped in with Hickory since they have similar characteristics even though they aren't related. It is also prone to tearout and can be tricky to work, but you didn't mention the working characteristics.
https://www.wood-database.com/pecan/#pics
Black Cherry bark will get rougher with age https://arboretum.uoguelph.ca/thingstosee/trees/blackcherry
Another way to find out would be to cut a piece on the tablesaw, Cherry has a distinctive sweet smell when being cut. I also notice what looks like mineral inclusions, typical of black cherry.
Interesting picture of that bark. My experience is otherwise, having grown up in a home that was built on a former orchard, I spent my youth climbing very large mature black cherry trees and the bark was never like that.
Another way to rule out one or the other would be just planing a board. Pecan is notorious for tearout and peeling like string cheese if you take too aggressive of a cut or don't have the sharpest blades. Cherry on the other hand has always worked pretty easy for me.
I wouldn't contest the possibility that it could be pecan. If you can determine that it's definitely a hardwood then yew is out.
Yew,by the way, all parts, is highly toxic ,like fatal and like right now! You want to deal with it very carefully. They use it to cure cancer!
Yew was the favored wood for English longbows( and magic wands). The French when they captured a English archer would cut off his middle finger so that he could no longer be a bowman. The vastly outnumber English routed the French at the battle of Agincort and largely because of the longbow. After the battle the English archers taunted the surviving French by displaying their middle fingers and shouting "Pluck Yew!" Oh, we happy few.....
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