You tell me what kind of wood it is one of the members was kind enough to post pics of my table on here with 2 very clear pics of rails
Sorry, i was out of the office on a trip to help a friend move his machine shop, woodshop, & a few thousand feet of Cuban and other mahogany, Satinwood, Brazilian Rosewood, other rosewoods, gabon ebony, BE & curly maples, QS w. oak, Curly cherry, etc, etc.
The building owner sold the commercial building out from under him for re-development and he has to downsize to fit into a 2,000 sf new space. We are both past 70, and he's a 1/2 decade older than me. Fortunately a few other youngsters in their mere late 60's were able to come in from time to time and assist us geezers.
To address your question, you need a lot better photos (in quality) to think about ID of wood that is not commonly used for rails. Also, one good, clean, end grain slice with a sheared face (like off a miter trimmer, or planed with a hand plane, not sawn) at 10x magnification. Photos are incredibly deceptive unless it is something simple like Brazilian Rosewood, QS white oak, & a few others.
With that in mind, the first word that popped into my mind when i saw the pix was "hickory".
But i don't think anyone would actually use hickory for rails. It is certainly hard enough, but not the first choice for stability.
Light could fool a person, and it faintly *could*, maybe, be flat saw older dense mahogany. Even some Cuban Mahogany had a yellow tone and grain like that. But usually the lesser quality wood. OTOH, It would not have an edge grain like shown in the blown up photo. which is more like an Elm or Hickory. (again, not common woods, especially not for rails) Could be flatsawn oak, maybe, but the grain does not look coarse enough. Could be old, Burmese Teak. Or even the more modern Teak that is green until it ages a bit. The old, dense stuff would probably make pretty good rails & has that leather tone. You'd have to sort the new stuff on the market (yeah, "what market" anymore in teak) to get pieces dense enough for rails. Just based on color and grain, it could even be red birch. Stable, but not terribly dense, about like teak. (red birch is the heartwood of yellow birch. Birch used to be more common in the 1920's when trees 3 ft in diameter were common all over the north)
Point being, looking at photos, a person could support viewpoints for a range of species, but most guesses would be wrong.
Certainly the FPL and other reputable wood id'rs won't even comment on photos.
Though if you can get an end grain cut, these guys will:
www.wood-database.com
www.wood-database.com
It is quite a cool table!
Be interesting to learn more history.
smt
