I scrounged beech from 2 different sources in the last week. 1 source of it the grain is yellow and the other the grain is white. Is that normal.
The yellow may be greener fresh cut and the white looks like limb wood. So to answer your question yes. It can be easy to hand split or really tough. Ill take beech all day long and over oak any day. Nice score there OD! EDIT: after looking closer at the pics the right split is a maple limb. Ive been fooled thinking its beech by the smooth bark. Probably red maple IMO.
I'm thinking you have red maple there on the right. It should have felt quite a big lighter in weight.
the one one the right looks suspiciously like red maple and when ive deslt with both every now and then i get messed up esp when no leaves are around
I'm not sure I've ever come across red maple before. Its always silver maple around here. Now the question is how does red maple compare to silver in btu's? Or other wood? I try to stack my wood keeping all the same relative btu's together. Does it rank with cherry? Popular? Ash?
It seems easy for some to confuse young soft maple or sometimes even aspen with beech so don't feel bad. I believe red maple is a bit better than silver. It coals nicely. It also shines if made into kindling wood and making that into kindling is super easy as it splits easy and is usually straight grained. But when making kindling I stay away from any knots.
I agree with red maple. A shortage of red maple in Ohio sounds odd to me. In terms of million BTUS per cord. Sugar is 24; red is 20 and silver is 17
Its most likely just around me. Most of the state has lots of hickory also but not a whole lot around here
Beech is the best wood to me by far. it lasts way longer than properly seasoned oaks for me... it seasons fairly quick and its so clean!!
We have abundant beech and red maple on our property. Some, but not all, young trees of both species look very similar. Even though I’ve been around them most of my life sometimes you have to look real close to tell the young trees apart. I like both for firewood. As an aside, spent the day (a beautiful, sunny day!) splitting and stacking two face cord of red maple. I enjoyed it.
In my area beech is easy to id in the winter because it holds its dead leaves right up until bud break. They really stand out in a forest of leafless trees.
Going off the bark picture alone, I don't think either one of those is beech. They both look like maple to me.
If you look at the grain they are definitely 2 different woods. And I scrounged the one one the left from a tree service that as they were still working on it they also said beech
