Walnut Question

[Curlycherry1]

Curly cherry guy. Great info. I find now that I'm a purist..sort of sounds a bit stuck up.....
I use a lot of walnut and try to find the boards that have that purple run through them. As you have said, when they have the purplish bits to them, the other grain sort of has higher contrast. Some really dark purpley bits, then some lighter bits. Seems I'm after air dried black walnut. The steamed stuff is sort of bland to me. Might be good for a large cabinet or something where you want something uniform. Up until now..I thought I was looking for steamed stuff...now I know I want air dried. Thanks for taking the time to teach me today.

I can walk around with my nose in the air now....and know why.

There is nothing wrong with being a wood snob. I suffer from that myself. You will know when you have crossed the line when you buy wood in single logs that have been sawn and kept together as this mill does. http://www.horizonevolutions.com/online-inventory/extra-wide-widths.html

I built my kitchen cabinets out of two logs of cherry. One for all the frames and one for all the panels in the doors. The door panels are curly cherry. That is being a wood snob!

 

[BlueRider]

Geez...CSI guy for trees. You can tell all that from a video...Imagine if you were beside the tree.

Juglans regia(english walnut) is easy to distiguish from all the other walnuts because the bark has a whish grey color to it with large scales. If that wasn't enough the leaves are also distictly different and are much larger and oval in shape rather than long skiny and pointed. more suble is the color difference of the leaves but once you see it a few times even that is easy to remember and use as a quick id tool.

trying to tell the difference between Juglans hindsii (claro walnut)and juglans nigra (american black walnut, or eastern black walnut)from a video would have been a different story.

 

[Old Blue]

Thanks Guys !

You folks have quite a collection of knowledge. While reading through all of this it was clear that any number of things may have been the case. I was thinking that I wasn’t going to be quite sure why this tree didn’t look like any walnut that I’d seen before.

BlueRider’s posts seemed to match up with the circumstances. After reading them, I googled “english walnut leaf, black walnut leaf” and found two pictures of the leaves of each. That was the positive ID that told me it is an English Walnut.

Thanks BlueRider for IDing it for me and all the great info regarding those trees and that area of central California.

Sawyer Rob’s pics of butternut and walnut bark also helped and clued me in to another part of the ID, this trees bark is different than the black walnuts bark.

A big thanks to everybody else who shared their ideas with me as well. Some of these posts are just filled with tons of info. Big thanks again – especially for all the pics and descriptions of different ways that walnut gets handled and processed.

We will still mill this wood and dry it but it’s definitely going to be used in some projects other than what I had hoped for.

Old Blue

 

[Andrew96]

Well I have to second that....thanks. I sort of rode in your coat tales and learned a lot...all over what seemed like a simple question. You guys are great.

 

[Sawyer Rob]

I have english walnuts here too, and the bark is smoother, and the leaves rounded, like was already mentioned.

Rob