Wood ID... Have I never split sugar maple before...?!?

[NickW]

I am splitting the "sugar maple" from a tree service drop. Obviously the cherry was easy to distinguish. There are at least 2 species that are the "sugar maple" though. I segregate by similar woods when stacking. The reddish stuff splits more like oak but smells like elm. The bark on the maple looks like sugar maple but smells like silver maple... See pics and give opinions please.

 

[NickW]

The maple is also very straight grained. Silver maple in my experience has not been very straight...

 

[hickoryhoarder]

In the first photo of logs I think I'm seeing red maple.

 

[Stelcom66]

If all of my wood was maple, like the one (I assume) on the right, I probably wouldn't consider buying a wood splitter, It's so easy to split - as stated maple being typically straight grained being the reason,

 

[NickW]

And then in my load of "all sugar maple and cherry" I hit an elm log... Good firewood, usually bad splitting. This particular one really wasn't too bad. Like I said in the original post it was splitting more like oak at first, then I hit some more typical elm like stringyness...

 

[peakbagger]

I had dropped an odd sugar maple this spring and bucked most of it in place. It had a big twist in it and obviously had grown up under a mature canopy. I just got around to splitting it after about 3 months. It was miserable stuff, dense grain with a major twist in every piece. I could hear the splitter drop to the second stage on every split and most splits did not go clean. Normally I hand split maple in the woods but this one was a real weird one. I had a couple of other maples that split easy. I do find that when they get big and old, they also can be a handful.

 

[Caw]

Looks like red maple to me. The only thing it's missing is the blotch like malting on the rounds, but, thats usually in older trees this one could be young. I'm tragically low on cherry sadly. It dries so fast, smells great, and works well to cut oak loads for not super cold days.

It's on the softer side for hardwood but it's good wood, I burn a ton of it here. I used it almost exclusively last year. This year I'm ready to start dipping into my oak so the red maple will have more of a shoulder season or cut the oak type role.

 

[tadmaz]

In the first pic, does mostly look like sugar maple bark. Last pic is red maple.