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help with wood identification and face gluing

2K views 11 replies 8 participants last post by  Camper 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
Hi everyone. A while back at a community garage sale, I bought a good amount of hardwood flooring (real wood) for next to nothing. They just wanted it out of their garage and who am I to say "no" :).

I just got around to planing a piece and need some help identifying it. Its redish-brown and the shavings what I think smells sort of like chocolate but that might be a stretch, maybe just cocoa nonetheless a musky smell. Here are a few pics. I apologize for the quality. Wifey took the camera and I resorted to using the computer camera. Laid it on a white piece of paper for reference.

Also is there any downsides to using this flooring wood for furniture projects? It seems like I get 0.65" thickness after planing off the stain and the grooves underneath so I will need to do some face gluing to get thicker dimensions. Would the glue-line be very visible or is it sort of like edge gluing?

Thanks in advance.

Wood Wood stain Floor Flooring Hardwood


Rectangle Wood Floor Flooring Wood stain
 

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#2 ·
How hard is it? It looks like Walnut in the photos but Walnut doesn't have much red in it. It might be Jarrah which is reddish and is common for flooring.

Flooring hard wood is no different than any other hard wood just cut for a specific purpose. It will be fine for furniture. Face gluing will most likely have visible glue lines but if your very selective about which peices you glue together you can get them to nearly dissapear. Use pieces with the grain flowing into each other and close in color.
 
#4 · (Edited by Moderator)
It does look like walnut and walnut does have a distinctive smell when you mill it. I've burned some walnut sapwood cutoffs and you can still smell it when it burns. Gives the campfire a nice aroma.
Rosewood may be another possibility. Had a large amount of rosewood flooring installed in a house project on Lake Huron. I do recall that it had a different smell also when the flooring contractor was sanding it. The lighting of the photo may be throwing the color off a bit.
 
#7 · (Edited by Moderator)
hmm..well I am pretty sure its not walnut. It has more of a red to it then walnut and definitely not walnut smell. As Jim suggested i checked some sights and am tempted to say its some sort of oak as it is hard and heavy like oak but could not be sure. Lots of pictures on those sites look alike….

I looked at some other boards and there seems to be a decent variety in color, some are more yellowish, this seems to be one of the darker ones but the others have finish on them so i could not be sure.

Don, thanks for the gluing tips. Anything I should do when clamping to minimize the glue line?

Yep yep, it definitely is not pine or aspen or cedar pr poplar :)...but why not oak?
 
#8 · (Edited by Moderator)
For clamping, just make sure to close the entire joint. You don't need a lot of pressure, you just need it distributed across the entire edge on both sides. I use some flat boads on both sides and clamp the boards I'm gluing in between then. It also helps keep them straight and protects them from clamp marks. Other things to do are to make sure the surfaces are planed very smooth and flat and use a very thin layer of glue. You can also use a glue with a color that better matches the wood. Like titebond 3 which is brownish in color instead of the usual yellow.

Oak is an open grain wood. That really doesn't look like oak at all. It looks too dense. Some better pictures including some of the pieces with other coloring would help a lot in idenifying it.
 
#9 ·
I'm siding with Moron-Jatoba, also called Brazilian cherry. Pretty common for floors these days. Google images of that and compare. Many of those pix are of finished floors, though.
 
#12 ·
ahaa!! sawdust you are right on the money!!! I checked some other sites for the pictures and that's it. I was very confused by the range of color/grain but the heart vs. sapwood explains it all. I am working on a project using it so I will post some better pictures as I make progress. Thanks
 
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