Figured wood

AlArchie · #1 03-03-2007, 07:54 AM

There have been several discussions about various figured woods on this board, and at the risk of "crossing boundaries" I found an upcoming series of short articles by a pro, over on Wood Magazine's site. Starting out with ambrosia or "ghost maple" this month. http://woodmagazine.com/wood/story.j...2596345765.xml

Al

brian bailey · #2 03-03-2007, 08:11 PM

Al, Thanks for the link, very interesting article.

I've sawn many board feet of ambrosia maple over the years. It makes beautiful paneling. In fact, I paneled my shop with it.

I have several thousand board feet of curly ambrosia maple in my shop just waiting for the right project.

Here are some pictures of another kind of maple that gets attacked and has simular markings, except the holes and stains are bigger.

Unlike soft maple which gets attacked by the ambrosia beetle, this maple gets attacked in late winter by the homo sapien sap seeking borer.

Instead of feeding on fungus, this borer collects the tree's sap and renders it into a sweet nectar.

Here are a couple of pictures in case you've ever wondered what tapping maple trees does to the lumber.

This borer is a bane to loggers and sawmillers!

btree50 · #3 03-04-2007, 01:07 PM

My question is, how do you control this type of borer? I heard they get pretty big too!!

chuckt · #4 03-05-2007, 08:57 PM

I've heard it said that if you tie em up in a plastic bag and hook it to a car's exhaust it'll kill em off. ;-)

Sorry - couldn't resist.

ChuckT

Nancy_G · #5 03-06-2007, 06:53 AM

good for a laugh ..... a great way to start the day.

brian bailey · #6 03-06-2007, 07:49 AM

Naw... I suspect the "in" method would be to ignore and maybe they'll go away

.

AlArchie · #7 03-06-2007, 08:17 AM

Wierd, you should say that, Brian. The biggest producer of maple syrup here in the west end of the UP, also happens to be one of the three largest commercial landowners in the state, and even though they have closed their mill a few years back, are still one of the most productive logging operations in the area. But they don't want to cut their "syrup pumpers!"

And boy, do I miss that mill.....used to be if we wanted a particular piece of lumber either for carving or construction or furniture, all we had to do was talk to the millwright, and he'd have it custom cut, kiln dried and ready to go in short order. And all that at his production cost plus his wholsale markup. Now we have to drive 50 to 200 miles to find custom milled lumber.

Al

brian bailey · #8 03-06-2007, 01:42 PM

Al,

My use of the term bane was as "in distress" caused to the loggers & sawmillers to have the best part of the saw or possibly veneer log end up on the firewood pile.

In my area, most maple trees are tapped. No one wants to take a chance on hardware, so the first 5 or 6 feet of the log gets cut off.

Here are 2 pictures of some sugar maples that I saved from being split into firewood.

The 1st pic is of a 10' log that they figured was full of hardware. Turned out only the bottom 2' was tapped. 8' lengths of nice clear lumber came out of that log, man was I disappointed! No hardware either.

2nd pic is pile of maple log shorts that were full of holes and stain. I was happy!

I only paid 25 cents / bf for this stuff delivered. If it wasn't for the tapping, the logs would be worth much more than I could afford.