wood ID by smell?

S

Ssonerai

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Out of curiosity, does anyone else base "smell" as a significant factor in ID'ing some woods?
Keep seeing cues in photos here & there and elsewhere that are listed as Cocobola that look more like padauk, cabreuva, or even cumaru, or one of many "no-name" tropical hardwoods. To me, African Blackwood, Cocobola, bloodwood, satinwood, and ebony among others have very distinctive aromas. So does Brazilian, but i can't claim personally to be able to distinguish that by smell alone, say compared to Blackwood or some other rosewoods on any given day.

smt
 
yes that's right. smell is one of the indicators used in identifying a wood species.. unlike color , grain pattern etc, smell is also difficult to describe accurately in words or text. Also it is common that many trees also have subspecies and area of origin. for example African mahogany is different from Honduran mahogany and southern pine differs from the pine that grows up north. If you were to consult a botanist they could confuse you further with the Latin names which are well documented and don't change rapidly. some woods are also allergens so some avoid dust of woods they are sensitive to . I knewa logger that was allergic to cedar. puprleheart is used in arrow making and is a known irritant. aromatic cedar is often used to make clothing chests as it deters moths. terpenes are detectable, for example that smell when you cut pine or detect the smell of a marijuana grow op are basically you detecting specific terpenes, They basically help the plant deter certain insects to protect themselves and their seed. If you are doing woodwork, turning, cutting etc then the inherent smell of the woods you are used to using will become familiar to you.

smell is also one way we link memories.
 
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Some woods are a dead giveaway by smell, but I would almost never rely on smell alone.
I turned some camphor burl a few months ago, that's probably the most distinctive smell of any wood.
 
wood that is unseasoned may have more smell too. I quite often machine100 year old fir to make old house parts and where possible I use recycled old growth lumber. It has a bit different smell to it than if I mill more recently cut fir. It is also very dry and have doe it's shrinking . maybe the wood releases stuff over time. most of the shrinkage will ocurr in the first year or two but I believe the shrinkage continues for a long period of time before it stabilizes even more.. the shrinkage takes years and of course then there is also expansion and contraction which is a different thing. a 100 year old plank 10' long may loose about 1/8" or so in length and it changes more across the grain. a different species may have a slightly different shrink rate.


my theory is this affects pool cues even though it is just very slight. old wood tends to give off some weight. Of course a cuemaker may want wood that's a few years old so that it's "stable" it is still changing over time. he may choose t turn a bunch of blanks and cherry pick the straightest. even still since it is wood it will experience changes in dimension over time.

where i can see this is if i look at antique tabletops and furniture ad look closely at how things fit. Often even though the manufacturer did use well seasoned wood, it wasnt' 100 years old and there will be changes. Maybe it stabilizes at some point so it stops shrinking. It won't ever stop moving with humidity changes but it may stabilize and stop shrinking in size at some point. I dont know how that could be measured.
 
snookered_again said:
wood that is unseasoned may have more smell too. I quite often machine100 year old fir to make old house parts and where possible I use recycled old growth lumber. It has a bit different smell to it than if I mill more recently cut fir. It is also very dry and have doe it's shrinking . maybe the wood releases stuff over time. most of the shrinkage will ocurr in the first year or two but I believe the shrinkage continues for a long period of time before it stabilizes even more.. the shrinkage takes years and of course then there is also expansion and contraction which is a different thing. a 100 year old plank 10' long may loose about 1/8" or so in length and it changes more across the grain. a different species may have a slightly different shrink rate.


my theory is this affects pool cues even though it is just very slight. old wood tends to give off some weight. Of course a cuemaker may want wood that's a few years old so that it's "stable" it is still changing over time. he may choose t turn a bunch of blanks and cherry pick the straightest. even still since it is wood it will experience changes in dimension over time.

where i can see this is if i look at antique tabletops and furniture ad look closely at how things fit. Often even though the manufacturer did use well seasoned wood, it wasnt' 100 years old and there will be changes. Maybe it stabilizes at some point so it stops shrinking. It won't ever stop moving with humidity changes but it may stabilize and stop shrinking in size at some point. I dont know how that could be measured.
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Couple things: "really old" wood that has been exposed to regular seasonal changes dries and the resins dry, evaporate, and polymerize. The wood gets stiffer, lighter, and a little bit weaker. Basically what people try to achieve in a few weeks by torrefication.

2.) wood shrinkage over time is interesting. If wood is assembled too tightly, individual elements might actually shrink more. Wood that is constrained when dampened, takes a compression set, and when dry shrinks below what it would have done "naturally" or in a completely free state. This is partly why old hardwood floors that were certainly installed rather tightly, end up having fairly wide or noticeable gaps over time.

Some woods are a dead giveaway by smell, but I would almost never rely on smell alone.
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Well certainly you have visuals, like for satinwood the smell is distinctive. but also you know you are looking at a blonde wood, as opposed to say trying a completely blind test to determine between Satin, Bloodwood, or Santos. I think i could still "always" get the satin, though. Never smelled anything that i would confuse with cocobola. But your comment begs the bigger question: When you are representing a wood, how many rely on what they were told at point of purchase. Or how many actually do a deeper dig including end-pore analysis with a low power microscope? I do when it matters. Actually, when it has mattered on a contract, i've have a university, or the FPL ID it. Even in the old days they were already substituting stuff we don't even see anymore, for "mahogany", e.g. Then again, even the FPL will not opine whether it is "cuban".
 
You made some good points and I learned a new word, " torrefication" ;-)

I restored the whole floor in my 100 year old house. some of the flooring was missing or damaged and it had a bunch of flooring layers overtop and some horrible to remove mastic. it had a lot of rusty nails in the kitchen and black marks which are a result of the tannins in the wood reacting with iron near each nail. I had to set a lot of the nails deeper, used wood bleach in the kitchen to get rid of the black marks. It was riddled with holes and fairly tight but some gaps.. I died the color back after bleaching, to match the other floors, drum sanded, pad sanded, rented the edger for the edges, hand scraped the whole floor while filling. used wetordry sandpaper soaked with oil to work in the oil.

I got really good at mixing the fillers to match the colors of the flooring so it would match after applied coatings. sealed most of it in with three coats of poly. I read a lot and put a lot of consideration into wheather or not I could fill the gaps and part of that was in the realization that yes it will expand and contract, but it also needs room to move with humidity changes. my rule of thumb was fill every gap that's large enough to fit a credit card into , leave the others for movement. for soem I cut wedge shaped strips to glue in..

It also came to me that some of the shrinkage was permanent. it wasn't all moving back to its original dimension. I spent a whole lot of time filling so I could sweep and not have all these gaps in the flooring. some was basically like making a silk purse from a sows ear but it did work out very nicely after much ado.

well fast forward and I did have a dishwasher hose leak and it humped up the floor a little in one area because water got trapped between some temporary rubber flooring I put down to protect. Since I had opted to use water based fillers, what happened was the filler got damp and squished out so my damage was actually very minimal and it flattened out once it dried and shrunk back. other areas did not suffer and its been 10 years so filling most of the gaps was successful. I left enough to allow the basic movement.

The comment about how the compression actually ads to the shrinkage makes sense the way you put it, I'd ever thought of it quite that way.

sometimes I look at old pool cues that are 70 to 100 years old and they are lighter. I think they have lost quite a bit since they were new. any sap inclusions are basically petrified. the wood is more brittle. driving a nail into a 100 year old fir 2x4 is like nailing into stone drilling a hole first helps otherwise it cracks easily. perhaps certian type so wood are affected more than others in terms of loosing their flexibility over time.


I always admired the fine grain of old wood that grew in dense forests with competition for light so the trees would only grow an inch of new in 100 years in many cases..

I fix different machinery, one job I did was to repair some hydraulic machinery used to do crush tests. engineering data. mostly its things like steel beams, the machines can put 1 million newtons of force on a 20 foot beam and measure it's bend characteristics.. then they use special sensors to measure the stretch and graph that against the increseing pressure to the fail point.

They set up a test with a whole bunch of miscellaneous blocks of fir and began doing sort of a crush test to see how well they stood up to the pressure before fracture. The part I came away wit that I found really interesting was that the fracture did not seem to be higher for the fine grained examples. the engineer reasoned that maybe since there were more "layers" there were also more fracture points. I had completely expected this to show how the finer grained woods were stronger but it did not come out like that..
now how they crushed the samples to their failure point could have been done in different ways so it wasnt completely conclusive. maybe if the wood had aged it could have changed the out come too.

for pool cue making I guess it is probably unusual to get separation due to different wood types being married together. maybe its a test of glue strength. It might be that the new and improved glues ( years back all there was really is hoof glue..) maybe that changed the necessity to make the full splice joints... now we have PL glue epoxy etc.

I don't make cues, I do admire the joinery, I really like to see the nice joinery and the samples of beautiful hardwoods. I'm a bit of a machinist so I enjoy learning about cue making. I imagine all this about shrinkage and also about the woods ability to spring back or flex and how time affects all that is interesting to learn about. its easy to see the beautiful combinations of wood but there must be a lot to the choices with respect to how different wood types affect the playability. I tend to think of the shaft being most important and I guess the butt doesn't really flex much but it basically acts as a hammer , so maybe the choices of wood used in the butt end are less significant and more about the color and how they present. I'm sure they still must have some effect..
 
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I was told BRW smells like bubble gum. When I cut some I had bought it did not smell like bubble gum. More like a dirty chicken coop.

So I sent it in to the USDA wood lab for identification and of course it was not BRW

I got another piece years later and it also did not smell like bubble gum. It smelled like black licorice. So I sent it in too and it was actually BRW.

One man's bubble gum is another mans black licorice. Which is why you need to develop an olfactory data base in your own brain.

Goncalo Alves is another wood with a very distinctive smell.
 
Ssonerai said:
Out of curiosity, does anyone else base "smell" as a significant factor in ID'ing some woods?
Keep seeing cues in photos here & there and elsewhere that are listed as Cocobola that look more like padauk, cabreuva, or even cumaru, or one of many "no-name" tropical hardwoods. To me, African Blackwood, Cocobola, bloodwood, satinwood, and ebony among others have very distinctive aromas. So does Brazilian, but i can't claim personally to be able to distinguish that by smell alone, say compared to Blackwood or some other rosewoods on any given day.

smt
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Dag nabit, that one smells like sewer wood
 
Coos Cues said:
I was told BRW smells like bubble gum. When I cut some I had bought it did not smell like bubble gum. More like a dirty chicken coop.

So I sent it in to the USDA wood lab for identification and of course it was not BRW

I got another piece years later and it also did not smell like bubble gum. It smelled like black licorice. So I sent it in too and it was actually BRW.

One man's bubble gum is another mans black licorice. Which is why you need to develop an olfactory data base in your own brain.

Goncalo Alves is another wood with a very distinctive smell.
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Whether bubble gum or black licorice I've never smell anything close to it that wasn't BRW working with some right now. :)
 
Mcues said:
Whether bubble gum or black licorice I've never smell anything close to it that wasn't BRW working with some right now. :)
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Once you've smelled it the scent isn't actually like either. It's filed under "BRW". I still have a 2 inch cut off from the only one I ever had that was real. I take it to my band saw and give it a cut every so often just to smell it and ingrain the scent in my mind like I have many other woods I work with often.

It's funny because I still have some scraps of the phony stuff I bought and the guy who sold it to me spoke of it's smell just about like you. "once you smell it you never forget". Ooops.

Yes, I'm a sniffer.
 
Coos Cues said:
Once you've smelled it the scent isn't actually like either. It's filed under "BRW". I still have a 2 inch cut off from the only one I ever had that was real. I take it to my band saw and give it a cut every so often just to smell it and ingrain the scent in my mind like I have many other woods I work with often.

It's funny because I still have some scraps of the phony stuff I bought and the guy who sold it to me spoke of it's smell just about like you. "once you smell it you never forget". Ooops.
Click to expand...
 
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Coos Cues said:
Once you've smelled it the scent isn't actually like either. It's filed under "BRW". I still have a 2 inch cut off from the only one I ever had that was real. I take it to my band saw and give it a cut every so often just to smell it and ingrain the scent in my mind like I have many other woods I work with often.

It's funny because I still have some scraps of the phony stuff I bought and the guy who sold it to me spoke of it's smell just about like you. "once you smell it you never forget". Ooops.

Yes, I'm a sniffer.
Click to expand...
Bubblegum.
And bocote smells like mustard.
 
snookered_again said:
You made some good points and I learned a new word, " torrefication" ;-)

I restored the whole floor in my 100 year old house. some of the flooring was missing or damaged and it had a bunch of flooring layers overtop and some horrible to remove mastic. it had a lot of rusty nails in the kitchen and black marks which are a result of the tannins in the wood reacting with iron near each nail. I had to set a lot of the nails deeper, used wood bleach in the kitchen to get rid of the black marks. It was riddled with holes and fairly tight but some gaps.. I died the color back after bleaching, to match the other floors, drum sanded, pad sanded, rented the edger for the edges, hand scraped the whole floor while filling. used wetordry sandpaper soaked with oil to work in the oil.

I got really good at mixing the fillers to match the colors of the flooring so it would match after applied coatings. sealed most of it in with three coats of poly. I read a lot and put a lot of consideration into wheather or not I could fill the gaps and part of that was in the realization that yes it will expand and contract, but it also needs room to move with humidity changes. my rule of thumb was fill every gap that's large enough to fit a credit card into , leave the others for movement. for soem I cut wedge shaped strips to glue in..

It also came to me that some of the shrinkage was permanent. it wasn't all moving back to its original dimension. I spent a whole lot of time filling so I could sweep and not have all these gaps in the flooring. some was basically like making a silk purse from a sows ear but it did work out very nicely after much ado.

well fast forward and I did have a dishwasher hose leak and it humped up the floor a little in one area because water got trapped between some temporary rubber flooring I put down to protect. Since I had opted to use water based fillers, what happened was the filler got damp and squished out so my damage was actually very minimal and it flattened out once it dried and shrunk back. other areas did not suffer and its been 10 years so filling most of the gaps was successful. I left enough to allow the basic movement.

The comment about how the compression actually ads to the shrinkage makes sense the way you put it, I'd ever thought of it quite that way.

sometimes I look at old pool cues that are 70 to 100 years old and they are lighter. I think they have lost quite a bit since they were new. any sap inclusions are basically petrified. the wood is more brittle. driving a nail into a 100 year old fir 2x4 is like nailing into stone drilling a hole first helps otherwise it cracks easily. perhaps certian type so wood are affected more than others in terms of loosing their flexibility over time.


I always admired the fine grain of old wood that grew in dense forests with competition for light so the trees would only grow an inch of new in 100 years in many cases..

I fix different machinery, one job I did was to repair some hydraulic machinery used to do crush tests. engineering data. mostly its things like steel beams, the machines can put 1 million newtons of force on a 20 foot beam and measure it's bend characteristics.. then they use special sensors to measure the stretch and graph that against the increseing pressure to the fail point.

They set up a test with a whole bunch of miscellaneous blocks of fir and began doing sort of a crush test to see how well they stood up to the pressure before fracture. The part I came away wit that I found really interesting was that the fracture did not seem to be higher for the fine grained examples. the engineer reasoned that maybe since there were more "layers" there were also more fracture points. I had completely expected this to show how the finer grained woods were stronger but it did not come out like that..
now how they crushed the samples to their failure point could have been done in different ways so it wasnt completely conclusive. maybe if the wood had aged it could have changed the out come too.

for pool cue making I guess it is probably unusual to get separation due to different wood types being married together. maybe its a test of glue strength. It might be that the new and improved glues ( years back all there was really is hoof glue..) maybe that changed the necessity to make the full splice joints... now we have PL glue epoxy etc.

I don't make cues, I do admire the joinery, I really like to see the nice joinery and the samples of beautiful hardwoods. I'm a bit of a machinist so I enjoy learning about cue making. I imagine all this about shrinkage and also about the woods ability to spring back or flex and how time affects all that is interesting to learn about. its easy to see the beautiful combinations of wood but there must be a lot to the choices with respect to how different wood types affect the playability. I tend to think of the shaft being most important and I guess the butt doesn't really flex much but it basically acts as a hammer , so maybe the choices of wood used in the butt end are less significant and more about the color and how they present. I'm sure they still must have some effect..
Click to expand...
"Torrefication" is not a word. Wood that been subjected to the torrefaction process becomes torrefied.
I also used term "torrefication" before discovering that it wasn't a real word. Turning/sanding torrefied maple reminds me of toasted marshmallows.
 
African Blackwood smells like chocolate :) lovely.

Not a wood, but i love the smell of elforyn too.
 
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