Stringy stuff

That looks great! Please load it up, and deliver to my house here in the North Carolina mountains. Thank you.

Looks like Hickory to me.

Kevin Weis said:

Looks like Hickory to me.

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I’ll echo that. Didn’t think white oak when I saw it.

Bark looks like oak but not the wood.

At first glance I saw silver maple.
Wet fresh cut ends, with sap collecting dirt. Smooth branches 4" or less. Pale color with lack of grain. Round ball like knot "in the very center of the picture", that split with no issue.
The white oak that I've gotten into is usually a stringy crotched and knotty mess, that takes full length ram strokes, then up end it and do it again just to gnaw through it. Silver maple pops apart, maybe with some flakes or strings holding together but not usually much.

Could this be Norway Maple ???

I'm thinking maple

Norway Maple typically splits a lot more cleanly than that.

I think the guys are right. I think that is hickory. White oak splits real clean.
Merry Christmas! HIckory is better than oak.
I love to burn hickory of course but I can't split it with my maul. I cut down a 12 inch hickory and it took 4 or 5 strokes just to bust the 15 inch truck pieces in two. God help me if I had a 24 inch piece I just couldn't do it.

I did get a dump truck load of hickory delivered a year ago for $250. The guy had already split it with a gasoline powered splitter.
I had to re split lots of the pieces to get them to the size I wanted and I could do that pretty well with my maul.

Another thing. After I stacked all that hickory, a year ago, I started noticing all this sawdust pouring from holes in the bark!
Some kind of GD beetle had gotten in to all that hickory wood. Never had this problem before with any other firewood.

Sawset said:

At first glance I saw silver maple.
Wet fresh cut ends, with sap collecting dirt. Smooth branches 4" or less. Pale color with lack of grain. Round ball like knot "in the very center of the picture", that split with no issue.
The white oak that I've gotten into is usually a stringy crotched and knotty mess, that takes full length ram strokes, then up end it and do it again just to gnaw through it. Silver maple pops apart, maybe with some flakes or strings holding together but not usually much.

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I'm thinking the same thing. What does it smell like? Hickory usually smells like manure when freshly split and it is HEAVY....

My guess would be be silver maple because of the bark and the white wood, but it usually it isn't stringy.

I like the stringy stuff fine because I can take those off and use for kindling

sweetgum ?

Bark not Sweet Gum.

Jan Pijpelink said:

It was not heavy. I did not smell anything "unusual".

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Then I would lean very much towards Silver Maple.

Check the twig off of one of the logs: if not opposite branch habit then you can rule out maple and ash.
Close up pic of a bud ?

My vote is Maple. I've had some gnarly twisted maples that took some time and strategic placement to get it to split.

My neighbor had a tree taken down that was the same as that one and nobody definitively identified it. I think it's a species of hickory. Whatever, it's firewood. Wood that splits stringy seems to dry quickly and light easy so it looks good from here!

Looks and sounds like silver maple and elm had a baby.

Speaking of stringy stuff...

Nice straight grain in this cottonwood

cotton wood willow box elder are mean like that . lot depends on your wedge also . mine is thin so tends to shear that kind of stuff rather than physically rip it in half like a wide wedge

Worst I ever worked was Elm.....thank God for hydraulics