Maple wood

“ It makes fine flooring and is used in skating rinks and for bowling alleys. Many pianos are made of maple. Wooden dishes and rolling pins are usually made from maple wood. During the spring of the year when the sap is flowing, the average mature maple tree will yield from fifteen to twenty gallons of sap in a period of three to four weeks. ”

“ The bark bears more resemblance to ash and basswood than to maple.
The wood is lightest of the maples. It weighs less than twenty-seven pounds to the cubic foot; has less than half the strength and about forty per cent of the stiffness of sugar maple; and is much inferior to it in most mechanical properties. It is equal, if not superior to most maples in whiteness. The pores are small, numerous, and scattered through all parts of the growth ring, as is characteristic of maple wood. The tree grows rapidly. The summerwood is a thin, dark line, separating one annual ring from another. ”

“ The maples grow on all of the continents of the northern hemisphere. Nearly one half of the known species belong in China, Japan, and the Orient. The principal European species (Acer pseudo-platanus) is the European sycamore. [25] The hard or sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is one of the principal deciduous trees of North America.
Maple wood [26] is characterized by its appearance and by its fine compact texture. The first quality is so marked that selected pieces take rank among the most beautiful of cabinet woods ”

“ Maple wood shrinks moderately, stands well in protected places, is strong, tough, but not durable when exposed. Pores are not arranged in circles, but are scattered irregularly throughout the layers. Maple is used for ceiling, flooring, panelling, car and ship construction, shoe-lasts, shoe-pegs, furniture, school supplies, implements, and machinery. Sugar is principally, although not exclusively, present in the sap of the sugar maple. [27] The softer species are sometimes [p041] tapped, and sugar is also present in the sap of other trees, such as the butternut and birch. ”

“ The green tint of the leaves is darker on some trees than it is on others, and in autumn they become, often before the first touch of the frost, of a splendid orange or gold, sometimes of a bright scarlet or crimson, color, each tree commonly retaining from year to year the same color or colors, and differing somewhat from every other. The most beautiful and valuable maple-wood is taken from this tree. ”

“ It is known as 'curled maple' and 'bird's-eye maple,' and the common variety looks like satin-wood. In the curled maple the fibres are in waves instead of in straight lines, and the surface seems to change with alternate light and shade; in the bird's-eye, irregular snarls of fibres look like roundish projections rising from hollow places, each one resembling the eye of a bird. Buckets, tubs and many useful things are made of the straight variety, and for lasts it is considered better than any other kind of wood. ”

“ This was what the maple said to the birch one day when the Summer and her patience with her sombre neighbor were on the wane—one day when there was a gleam of golden pumpkins in the tawny corn stubble beyond the wood, and the purpling grapes hung ripening over the old stone wall that lay between, and the maple had brightened its summer dress with a gay little leaf set here and there in its shining folds. ”

“ Of the Maple family we may briefly notice only one more, the Rock Maple, "which in all respects is the most remarkable tree of the family." While young, it is justly admired for its ornamental beauties as a shrub. When in a state of maturity, "for the purposes of art, no native wood possesses more beauty or a greater variety of appearance."
"In the forest the Rock Maple often attains great height, and produces a large quantity of timber. A tree in Blandford, which was four feet through at base and one hundred and eight feet high, yielded seven cords and a half of wood." ”

“ The sap, too, can be boiled down to sugar, but it is not nearly so rich as that of the proper sugar-maple. The wood, which is very light-colored with a tinge of rose in it, is often made into common furniture, as it takes a fine polish and is easy to work with. It is used, too, for building-purposes. The early-summer foliage of the red maple is of a beautiful yellow green, and the young leaves are very delicate and airy-looking; but the graceful tree is in such a hurry to display her gay autumn colors that she will often put on a scarlet or crimson streamer in July or August. ”

“ Somehow, the feeling roused by these things loosened my tongue.
“This is an old hard-wood forest,” I began. “Much of the white oak, hickory, ash, maple, is virgin timber. These trees have reached maturity; many are dead at the tops; all of them should have been cut long ago. They make too dense a shade for the seedlings to survive. Look at that bunch of sapling maples. See how they reach up, trying to get to the light. They haven't a branch low down and the tops are thin. Yet maple is one of our hardiest trees. Growth has been suppressed. ”

“ What art in the red-eye to make these two adjacent maple twigs serve for the rim of its pensile basket, inweaving them! Surely it finds a place for itself in nature, between the two twigs of a maple. On the side of the meadow moraine, just north of the bowlder field, I see barberry bushes three inches in diameter and ten feet high. What a surprising color this wood has. It splits and splinters very much when I bend it. I cut a cane, and, shaving off the outer bark, find it of imperial yellow, as if painted,—fit for a Chinese mandarin. ”

“ Maple has been a choice wood since the time of the Romans, who used it for their pikes and lances as well as furniture. Known to the lumber trade as hard maple, the strong, close-grained wood makes firm flooring, lustrous furniture, bowling alleys and pins, and musical instruments. Accidental forms known as curly maple and birdseye maple are prized for fancy-figured furniture and cabinets. ”

“ The absence of stripes distinguishes this tree from striped maple, which has nearly the same range. Mountain maple grows from Maine to Minnesota, southward to Michigan, and along the mountains to Georgia. The wood is light, soft, brown tinged with red. The small size of the trunk forbids its conversion into ordinary lumber. The only commercial use reported for it is in Pennsylvania where it is cut along with other hardwoods for destructive distillation.
Florida Maple (Acer floridanum) is a species according to some, and according to others is a variety of the hard maple. ”

“ Most of them grow quickly and therefore become valuable as shade [545] trees. They do not make the most permanent trees, however, and should be planted in alternation with oaks, or other long-lived trees, for permanent shade.
The seeds of all maples are winged, which helps their distribution over large areas, in the same manner as the seeds of evergreens.
Sugar or Rock Maple.—The most valuable timber tree of the group, its wood being heavy, hard, strong, and close-grained. Very light in colour and valuable for flooring and interior finish, furniture, tool handles, and bench tops. ”

“ The flowers appear in the spring before the leaves, in dense clusters, and are of a greenish-yellow color. The fruit ripens in late spring. It consists of a pair of winged seeds or “keys” with wings 1 to 2 inches long on slender, flexible, threadlike stems about an inch long.
The wood is soft, weak, even-textured, rather brittle, easily worked, and decays readily when exposed. It is considerably used for boxboards, furniture, veneers and fuel.
The red maple, or swamp maple, Acer rubrum L., has leaves deeply lobed with the lobes sharply toothed. The autumn color is deep red. ”

“ Domingo mahogany, brought back in the ship-bottoms of English traders, but the English workmen who made furniture in the new world, while they adopted this foreign wood, were not slow to appreciate the wild cherry, and the different maples and oak and nut woods which they found in America. They were woods easy to work, and apt to take on polish and shining surface. The cabinet-makers liked also the abnormal specimens of maple where the fibre grew in close waves, called curled maple, as well as the great roots flecked and spotted with minute knots, known as dotted maple. ”

“ Good saw timber is not often cut from this species near the outer borders of its range.
The wood is about three-fourths as strong as hard maple, and is five pounds lighter per cubic foot, but is about six pounds heavier than soft or silver maple. It may, therefore, be considered that in some important points red maple is midway between hard and soft maple. In color it is light brown, slightly tinged with red. The sapwood is thick and lighter in color than the heart. The tree is usually not of rapid growth. The contrast between the springwood and summerwood is not strong. ”

“ Vine maple (Acer circinatum) (fig. 23) is abundant from British Columbia to northern California. On rich river bottoms it is sometimes 15 to 20 feet high and 6 inches in diameter. In the park it is usually a bush or low shrub with a bent and curiously crooked stem, growing along streams and as undergrowth in the forest. It is very common up to 3,000 feet. In autumn the leaves are a bright scarlet. The wood is tough and elastic and makes a hot and lasting fire. ”

“ It weighs about 30 ℔ per cub. ft.
There are several varieties of maple growing in Canada and the United States, but the one in most common use is the sugar maple, also called rock maple, which grows freely in the districts around the Great Lakes. The wood is fine-grained, frequently with a beautiful wavy figure, yellowish white to light brown in colour; it is very hard, tough and durable. Birds’-eye maple has a peculiar curly grain, and is much in request for ornamental joinery. ”

“ The soft maple or silver maple (see illustration, page 199) has a white-lined leaf, cleft almost to the midrib and each division again deeply cut. It is quick and ready to grow, and has been widely planted as a street tree, especially in prairie regions of uncertain rainfall. It is one of the poorest of trees for street planting, because it has a sprawling habit and weak brittle wood. The heavy limbs have great horizontal spread, and are easily broken by ice and windstorms. When planted on streets, they require constant cutting back to make them even safe. ”

“ A few years back, maple ranked next to mahogany for these purposes, but lately black walnut has been more in favor. With the exception of the ash-leaved variety, a Western tree, all the American maples are said to be found in this county. The moose-wood, [1] a small tree of graceful, airy growth, and bearing the prettiest flowers of the tribe, to whose young shoots the moose is said to have been so partial; the mountain maple, a shrub growing in thick clumps with an upright flower, the scarlet maple, the silver, the sugar, and the black sugar maples, are all included among our trees. ”

“ It is found in the swamps of southern Georgia and western Florida, and westward to Texas, Louisiana, and southern Arkansas. Near the southwestern limits of its range in Texas and Mexico, it is often a shrub; but in the best part of its range it becomes a tree fifty or sixty feet high and two or three in diameter. The wood passes for hard maple when sawed into lumber, but it is not often sent to sawmills. The makers of bent wood rustic furniture in some of the southern towns, particularly in Louisiana, have found the slender branches of Florida maple well suited to that purpose. ”

“ The wood of the palm and the cork-tree is soft, while that of the apple and the pear is compact. Such, however, is not the case with the maple, its wood being brittle, as, in fact, all veined woods are. In every kind of tree, the varieties in the wood are still more augmented by the wild trees and the males. The wood, too, of the barren tree is more solid than that of the fruit-bearing ones, except in those species in which the male trees2716 bear fruit, the cypress and the cornel, for instance. ”

“ In this sturdy, stately tree, tapping may go on for years without seriously affecting the life of the tree or the quality of its wood. In spring, after the sugaring-off season, the maple sends forth myriads of greenish-yellow clustered flowers from which bees obtain pollen and nectar. In early summer seeds mature and fall to the ground on papery wings. Later, in autumn, sugar residue in heart-shaped thin leaves combines chemically with other substances to produce the most striking orange-yellows and reds of the hardwood landscape. ”

“ Accidental forms with the grain curled and contorted, known as curly maple and bird’s-eye maple, are common and are highly prized in cabinet-making. The ashes of the wood are rich in alkali and yield large quantities of potash. ”

“ The ash her purple drops forgivingly
And sadly, breaking not the general hush;
The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,
Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush;
75All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze
Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,
Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush. ”

“ For balls and mallet heads good rock maple is the most desirable of all our native woods, and hickory is the best for mallet handles. Box-wood is very good for mallet heads, but is too heavy for balls. Box-wood mallet heads and good rock maple balls, well painted, make an elegant and superior set, and are preferable to a complete box-wood set, while rosewood and lignum-vitæ balls are little better than iron, and entirely unfit to use. ”