If I’m looking at antique furniture, or any other wood product, how do I tell if the wood is pine, oak, cherry, maple, poplar, beech, or anything else? I’m watching the woodwright shop, and the host looked at a piece of wood and identified it as “tulip poplar”
I’m sure there are tricks to it, like straightness of grain, or maybe color (if the piece isn’t finished), but other than that, I’m at a loss.
Is there a way to do this easily?
Experience. After you’ve worked with a type of wood you learn what it looks like. Sometimes smell as its cut. Pine is easy to recognize when you cut it.
Tulip Poplar often has green streaks in its grain. Walnut is very dark brown and is used in gunstocks. Oak is usually easy to recognize and has a yellowish color.
But the best way is to remember what you bought at the store for your project. 
There’s lots of woods I wouldn’t recognize.
It’s pretty much 100% memorization. Knowing a little about wood structure can help give you a way of classifying more pronounced traits but some woods like Douglas fir and western larch are essentially identical without a microscope. Red cedar smells like a cedar chest, incense cedar smells like pencils. Oaks have little dark squiggle lines or dots depending on what side you are looking at. Wood from the same tree can look amazingly different depending on whether it was heart wood or if it was cut at an angle. Tulip poplar can be easy to identify because of the amount of green tones in the wood. Most people that are trying to impress people with their knowledge can pick out a few easily identifiable woods and gloss over ones they have no clue about.
You have to observe the grain, the color, the weight, and hardness (antique shops may not like you testing the hardness). You just have to pick it up with experience, and then you can still turn out to be wrong because there are a lot of different types of trees, and not all are easy to tell apart. Sometimes names are generic and don’t identify a specific species. Mahogany is used as a name for many unrelated tropical hardwoods for instance. And even closely related or the same species may grow with different characteristics in different parts of the world.
This book, Understanding Wood, has a sizable section on wood identification. The technique involves looking at the detailed structure of the wood with a 10-power magnifier. Very useful, IME.
Color is iffy for wood ID purposes on all but recently-worked wood surfaces, as wood color changes with time even in the absence of any finish (and even when fresh, natural variation throws a wrench to the works). What doesn’t change, regardless of fit, finish or individual tree quirks, is wood structure, which remains"readable" even in charcoal.
When I look at a piece of wood, the first thing I check is to see if the wood is ring-porous, diffuse-porous or coniferous. This is readily evident without magnification, and instantly narrows down the options. The ring-porous oak, ash and elm stand out from diffuse-porous maple, birch, cherry, alder etc. at a glance. The conifers, lacking vessels (which make the pores of hardwoods) are also a distinctive group with a close look.
Next, with hardwoods, is the presence or absence of (visible-to-naked-eye) rays, and the size, shape and pattern of them. Woods like oak, maple and beech are most easily ID’d by their distinctive rays. Ring-porous oak and elm both have visible rays, but the rays are clearly different from each other, as are the rays of diffuse-porous maple and beech.
The pattern of knots, when present, is useful for separating certain hard-to-tell conifers from each other. This is applicable also, with small-dimension hardwood specimens, as the branching pattern is a constant within tree families but varies between them.
Wood density varies immensely between species, but also within species. Roughly estimated density can still be useful for further ID. With generally relatively featureless diffuse-porous woods, where finishing can easily hide subtle features, the density difference between, say, alder and birch is evident.
ID’ing wood to within genus with these and other “field methods” is doable, but there are hundreds of species of oak and pine, for instance, out there. For positive, accurate ID, microscopic analysis is needed. Even with it, certain closely related species can’t be told apart.
Or you can send a sample to the Forest Products Laboratory of the USDA, and they’ll do the ID’ing for you.
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With the caveat that in extreme cases, density can be very helpful. Very few other woods can have a density as low as balsa, or as high as hornbeam, for instance. Though that won’t help much in the vast middle ground.
Yep. But as you say, the vast majority of stuff made of wood is made from species somewhere around the middle, density-wise. Where balsa is used, it is most often obvious what wood is in question. Yet even balsa’s density varies so much that high-density balsa is equally dense to some other very-low-density hardwoods.
P.S. Hornbeam is small fish when it comes to dense woods :D. Loads of woods in common use go way beyond it (no need to go to Lignum vitae or snakewood). Ekki is one I’ve worked with in lumber form: it’s average density is 1.5 times that of hornbeam.
This is a great link. Thanks for posting it.
They will do up to 5 identifications a year for free. That’s pretty nice,
It’s somewhat similar for metals, BTW - I’ve seen expert welders and shop people working for me who could look at metal and instantly identify it as steel, aluminum, magnesium, titanium, tungsten…or pickup and flex or work with a piece of steel and identify it as 1045, 1010, 1090…I never developed that skill.
An earlier edition was titled Identifying Wood, which inspired a rather amusing image macro.
