It's from the appalachian mtns in southern Ohio. It's a medium tree about the size of a hickory or deep woods walnut, but there's absolutely no information about it in any of my forestry research or on the web. Old timer lumberjacks call it "tame shumak", or just "sumac tree". It's not poison sumac as in the small brushy tree. But it's full of milky sap like the poison sumac & has nearly identical leaf shape & orientation. Its just a rare deep woods tree that was never plentiful enough for commercial lumbering, but isn't unkown to the local loggers. This tree was about 180-200 yrs old & was the smallest in the grove, which was why I could handle the logs by hand if cut short enough. All of them were burly. One even had a giant burl, which I also cut.
I'll try to get pics of the storage & stuff. I cut the trees up north & mill them immediately, then stack them in a small barn for a few months to a year, then bring them to the desert to finish drying. Some woods like maple shaft logs gets milled & stuck in a kiln until 6%. Around here in the desert, i'm cutting dead trees, some that are still standing. That wood is dry. It's hard on the saw, too. Squares get cut as soon as wood is dry. Woods like the mulberry I cut as dead trees & it's ready for immediate use. Beautiful stuff, too. Same with mesquite and ironwood. There's not really any secret. I learn about each wood as I work with it, and the next time I know what to do & what not to do. Next year or maybe later this fall, i'm gonna start pulling out dead trees from the creek & river bottoms. Those will be interesting as i'll have no clue what they are until milled. Even then might not know. I'm having lots of fun, though.
So many tropical hardwoods. I'd imagine that it's not unlike the USA, where there are certain hardwoods that are marketed due to their abundance & size. Here we have oak, maple, cherry, hickory & walnut that are the commonly known & marketed hardwoods but there must be 100 or more other hardwood trees that are never known in popular wood working & the lumber market. I can think of half a dozen types of elm trees that have stunning color & grain but they're never timbered so you never see anything made from it. Even the loggers who cut the major trees will only take the straight logs & will leave everything else for folks to cut up as firewood. If there's burls, crotch areas, etc, anything that doesn't look uniform, they leave it. I always wanted a way to harvest that kind of stuff & now I can. Should be plenty fun.
