YAWIT (Yet Another Wood ID Thread - please help!)

[daizee]

Hi All,

A few weeks ago I raffled off a little cocobolo hiker at my outdoorsman's club's monthly meeting raffle as a donation to the club.
The fellow who took it home got in touch with me after deciding he did indeed want a belt clip.
Being a mature fellow without a computer, he doesn't shop online, so I ran over there to trade him a tek-lok at cost.

What a nice guy! Turns out he does museum-quality period furniture restoration - upholstery, mainly. We had a nice chat, and then he insisted on giving me the three pieces of wood below as he's had 'em forever and won't use them.

Help ID them, please!
He said the middle is Ebony, and that looks right to me. It's heavy and dense.
The top one has grain similar to my cocobolo, but less red and less dense. It doesn't have an oily feel.
The bottom I can only make guesses about. It looks like the things people say are ironwood, but there are probably lots of things that look like that. It's quite dense, tight-grained, and the cut surface is smooth.
There is no smell to any of them just by scratching the surface with a fingernail.

 

[quint]

The reddish one looks kind of like bloodwood to me. Ebony sounds right for the middle. No idea on the bottom maybe ironwood would be my guess just by looking at it.

 

[M.Griffin]

I would say the bottom one could be osage orange. The cut area looks like burn rather than figure, is that right? I have a log of osage in my rafters that looks similar.

-Mike

 

[daizee]

Yeah, it looks like burning in the heartwood from the cut, but I'm not 100% certain.

 

[dgjester]

i almost want to say locust for the piece on the bottom. if it was local, then that's a possibility, provided you aren't too far north. should have an odd smell to it when you saw it that goes away after a moment. it should also be very dense.

 

[P. McKinley]

Top piece - either Bloodwood, or if when sanded it turns orange, then Padauk.

For the middle piece, I almost want to say "Brown Heart"(Bruneheart - sp??). To me, the grain looks wrong for any of the ebony's.

Bottom - I'm out!

 

[Brian.Evans]

Did you do the cutting on the bottom, or has it been like that for a while? If the former, I'm going with arc d'bois or Osage. If the latter, I'm out.

 

[johnnym]

I have a piece of straight grain bubinga in the shop that looks a lot like the top one.

 

[A C Richards]

Top one is a rosewood, probably Honduran. Middle could be ebony hard to tell in the picture rough cut. The bottom one. Well Does it have a green tint to the outer layer?? hard to see in the pic. If sanded it might smell a little like nutmeg. If yes to either of these it is Lignum Vitea. It is very hard and checks quite easily. If no to the above then I agree with the Osage Orange. But I had some LV that looked just like that. Just a bit greener on the outer layers. That happens with time.