What makes the eye in bird’s-eye maple?
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Replies
There are theories, but the exact cause is still unknown. Most theories, at least from my years in school for forestry, had to do with stressdistress.
Has bird's-eye maple been around for a long time, or did it show up when pollution, acid rain, etc. did?
Are the stripes in tiger maple caused by unique colorations in the wood, or is it an effect that is enhanced by the way it is cut?
Edited 11/10/2002 5:12:17 PM ET by DWREAD
Birdseye has been around for a long time. It is not a recent phenom. We were told that in the early days of woodworking in this country, it was often considered a flaw and left to utilitarian wood working. Can't verify that for you though. Asking about it's history is reasonable IMO. It's not a wood seen often in older pieces.
Can't help you with the Tiger Maple.
Don
Not only was birdseye considered a flaw, it was not even used in flooring unless one bought "seconds", which were usually short pieces or pieces with mineral stain, etc. I wonder if it had something to do with the difficulty of preventing tear-out, or simply a matter of taste?
Jeff
Jeff,
Hard to say what they were thinking back then. Although I never saw this, the UP is full of stories of Japaneese brokers spending hundreds of thousands for buying specific maples for shipment to Japan. One MTU story was 50k for one tree.
Jon,
I remember one studytheory about the stress of edge effects. The theory was kind of blown away by city arbor programs. Most the maples in cities along roads with car pollution, car splashing rainslush, snow plows, micro climates, non competitive, etc. would turn out as birdseye, but it's not the case. I also remember a discussion of genetic reasearch. Nothing was found at the time, but then again genetics has come a long way since then. Yep, nutrition seems to be the accepted culprit by most. Heck, maybe birdseye is normal and they are looking at this whole thing backwards??? haha
Don
Don G.
I've been to the log auctions in the UP of Michigan, the high priced logs don't necessarily go to the Japanese as most of the buyers I've seen are Germans and Italians. In the early 90 the market was nuts and $30 a board ft. in the log was not all that rare although most went for 10 to 15 bucks a foot. The photo below is a desk I made from a $4000 log the lumber company furnished me to build for the owner. I have been around birdseye for over 30 years and would have to agree with Jon Arno's theory as to how it forms. Although I'm not sure that stress is the big factor. Seems the major concentration of Birdseye is toward the western end of the peninsula, climate stress is no worst there than in my back yard which is close to the center of the UP. All I know is I'm finding less and less of it every year, my guess is in another decade it will be pretty much gone.
Armin,
Where you at in the UP? Assuming by Seney since you say center. One of the swampymarshy areas. Boy, I miss it up there.
Nice desk. The picture is kind of big!
Don
Edited 11/12/2002 9:06:03 AM ET by Don C.
Don, Munising to be exact, the land of crappy weather and encroaching urban sprawl. The photo is big, its a big desk, 9ft x 9ft footprint. I guess I should have posted the overall pic as well, see attachment. You say you miss it up here, where were you from?
Armin,
Spent my fair share of time at the Dog Patch for lunch or super depending on the time of day. Went to college at MTU and still have a place up in Calumet. Been a couple of years since I've been able to make it up there though. Maybe this winter.
Again, good looking desk there. How did you run across a comission for that large of a desk in your area. I'm just assuming, but I wouldn't think you build many like that up there.
Don
Don,
You would be surprised, things are not at all what they used to be, my shop speciality is staircase work and in the last 10 years I have yet to work on a house less that 350K with several being over 1 million of course I travel the entire peninsula to get the nice projects. I'm a Detroit transplant and I like it up here but it's starting to get pretty built up compared to the 70's.
All I can say is, "WOW!"
Pure and simple, that maple knocked my socks off.
--
Lee in Cave Junction, Oregon
On the Redwood Highway
Don
I collect antiques and I'm not sure what you call old(relative term I guess) but I have pieces from the 18th century that are figured maple, both birdseye and tiger maple.
Doug
Hmm, Doug? From the 1700's? Let's guess that some of those maples were two hundred years old when they were cut down. (I don't believe man was considered a considerable polluter in the 1500's, which is a response of sorts to an earlier point made by someone-- I forget who now, sorry.) By my reckoning, that makes some of your pieces maybe 500 years old, if you count from seed onwards, if you get my drift.
But your question opens up a new angle, in a way, regarding age. Say you dig up a trunk of oak from an Irish bog and make some furniture-- how old is it? The piece of oak could have been buried in the bog for three thousand years, and prior to that lived for maybe 300- 400 years before it died, toppled, and fell into the bog to be preserved.
And didn't the shipbuilders go out into the oak forests of England and mark out oak trees for observation over the years (decades and centuries?) as being potentially suitable for the laying of a ships keel? Some of those old oaks cut down in the reign of Henry XIII from virgin forests for shipbuilding were supposed to be of almost legendary girth. How old must an oak tree be to achieve a trunk diameter of 10- 12' in the British climate, which has admittedly fluctuated greatly over the millenia?
Much of Northern Europe was covered in ice just 10,000 years or so back, and the last time the Thames froze hard enough in London to hold the Thames winter market or fair on it was sometime in the 1700's, a mini Ice Age--- and who would believe that the climate in southern Scotland was warm enough in the early medieval period, or late Dark Ages, to sustain vines capable of being turned into wine as evidenced by archeological digs at the long defunct hospital and monastry at Melrose?
Oh, jings ma' boab, I seem to be way off topic, but this thread is a beauty and has all the right ingredients to become a great general rumination. Slainte. Some stuff I've made.
Richard
There was an article in some mag. about a guy buying some birdseye(at least I thought they were) maple boards( if I remember right the 'boards were some 30 to 40 inches across, don't recall exactly) they had been stored for 100 years(it seems that this was documented somehow)I remember seeing a picture of him standing next to them. He was commissioned to build some sort of table, pedestal I believe, for a woman and she was going on about how those trees were probably seedling when Columbus set sail, its amazing to think about it.
I guess when you put things in perspective maybe they haven't been using maple all that long. I have a empire game table(circa 1820's) made of mahogany with some mahog. crotch veneer on the top, the underside of it has fantastic birdseye maple. Apparently that cabinetmaker didn't think much of figured maple.
On another note and nothing to do with this thread , I'm heading down to your parts of the country tomorrow morn. with my wife and see what the job opportunities are for me, shes already got hers lined up.
Saw your pics in the TEXFEST, how come nobody looks like you would think they would?
Doug
Doug,
Wow, don't think I implied there was a law or something against using it! ;*) I was just relaying what we were told which was most woodworkers considered the wood flawed so it was left for construction or strictly utilitarian pieces. As far as I know, there is no Chippendale or Ducan Phyfe with birds eye is there? In fact, maple seems to have taken a back seat to cherry, oak, walnut and some others woods in early american pieces.
Dib
Dib
I didn't think that I came across in a way to offend anyone, just making an observation.
Yes there are pieces of furniture from Duncan Phyfe with fig. maple. I don't know if you mean Tom. Chippendale personally or Chippendale period, if you mean the later than yes there are many fig. maple pcs. from that period. There are pieces of fig. maple much earlier than Chippendale, depending on your definition of rare, they really aren't rare.
Doug
Hey Doug, wasn't offended at all. Hence the winking smilely face. Really, all I was doing was relaying what we had been told and it seems to bear itself out. I'm sure birds eye is out there in early american pieces, but by the lack of many examples it seems to bear true that the wood was not the prefered material many other woods were. Others here seem to have knowledge or experiences that bear this out. Again, I have neither the experience or knowledge beyond what we were told in school in the heart of birds eye country.
Don
You guys need to keep in mind that maple is hard, I do a lot of resawing and birdseye is the toughest wood I saw, 4 ft per minute with a stellite tipped blade is doing good. By contrast I get about 8 ft per minute with red oak. I can't imagine how gruling it must have been to saw maple in colonial times using a pit saw. Birdseye grows slower than plain maple, the growth rings of birdseye average about 15 years to the inch as compared to 10 rings or less for plain maple. The time is money concept was just as revelant in 1690 as it is now. My guess is earlyt american furniture containing figured wood was commissioned by people who could afford the extra cost it took to build it, hence not all that common and not all that different from the here and now.
Armin,
I don't doubt the changes coming to your area. Much of the Keewenaw is now being built up by money from the Chicago area. 5000 sq. ft. summer homes on the lake.
You may be on to something with the time involved, but still as others have posted--seconds for flooring and the underside of table tops. Another possibility may be the European influences to the dark pieces. I've never seen it, but what happens to birds eye with a cherry or walnut stain? I can only imagine.
Don
The figure in tiger maple is caused by its wavy grain, rather than any unique pigmentation. The appearance of the figure is (can be) enhanced by the way it is cut to expose the grain so that it "shimmers" in the light. The reflective properties are maximized when the wood is cut so that the fiber direction angles up to the surface and then down away from the surface with each ripple...In other words; when the plane of the surface "knocks the tops off" of each wave. If cut perpendicular to this plane, the grain pattern is curly, but does not display the same reflective properties...Sure do hope this makes sense?...
As to early use of these figured maples, I've seen Pensylvania Rifles (commony known as Kentucky Rifles) with figured stocks. So maybe the carpenters didn't like figures maple but the gunsmiths knew a good thing when they saw it.
BJGardening, cooking and woodworking in Southern Maryland
BJ, violin makers have also used the curly figures for centuries...But I think it's fair to say that cabinet makers used to think twice about using it back in the hand tool era. Except for fancy decorative applications on real "artistic statement" pieces, it added a lot of risk to the hand planing and shaping processes...Not a welcome complication in production shops, using mostly right-off-the-farm apprentice labor to crank out utilitarian furniture.
The Shakers used quite a lot of it in their furniture.
By the way, do we know what produces the special sound in violins by Stradivarius, Amati, Del Jesu, etc.?
The debate over what makes Strads sound so good will probably last until the end of time. I've heard it argued that it was the finish he used, while others claim it was the "aged", or pond stored condition of the woods. It is true that submerged wood is attacked by anearobic bacteria that weaken, or thin, the cell walls...which appears to alter the tonal quality of the wood...But it's equally probable that the sound results from a combination of factors. Afterall, the guy was pretty good at his craft, and I'm sure he had more than one trick for giving his product a point-of-difference.
...And Dave, as for the use of figured maple by Shaker cabinet makers, I suspect they did it because it was about the only way they could make any kind of a style statement in their work...given Shaker rules about unpretentious function. I think a lot of these guys really weren't all that into Shaker ideology. They just joined the sect knowing that, if they could keep their paws off the ladies, it was the ideal place for cheap room and board.
Edited 11/11/2002 12:34:07 PM ET by Jon Arno
Jon,
"Afterall, the guy was pretty good at his craft"
Ya THINK!!!
We have a luthier here on Maui who makes magnificent guitars. He specializes in arch-top models, but also makes flat tops. Recently I got to play one of his flat tops - an $18,000 model (I was almost afraid to hold the thing, lest I scratch it).
I had been pretty proud of my Martin D18 which was made in 1957 (and cost $175 then). But compared to his, mine sounded downright muddy. We got to talking about the factors that go into the sound quality of these instruments. He is a firm believer that the sound board (the top) improves with age because the resins in the spruce continue to harden long after the instrument is made, improving the resonating quality.
He said that my guitar sounded dull because it had not been played in a long time. It had been in storage for 2 years, although it had new strings. He encouraged me to play it a lot and loud, because that would improve the resonance of the hardened resins.
I started playing it a lot and I thought that it's sound brightened up a lot over 2 weeks. So did he. But I really can't tell if it wasn't just my rusty technique improving that made all the difference.
Do you have any opinion of his theory of aging resin, or being able to change the resin qualities with vibration of the wood?
R
Edited 11/11/2002 2:00:40 PM ET by Rich Rose
Rich, I'd agree with your local luthier. As wood ages it tends to harden and become more brittle, which seems to brighten its tonal qualities. whether it is the drying of the resins or the lignin is another question, since even non resinous woods also harden...It's probably a little of both...But definitely the drying out of the wood hardens it. This has been known for literally thousands of years, in that it is believed Stone Age hunters hardened the points of their wooden spears by heat treating them.
As for the value of playing an instrument to improve its tone, it seems to work on my dulcimers. I have about as much musical talent as a poorly trained parrot, but I know when my daughter comes home and takes a dulcimer down off the wall and plays it for a few days the sound does seem to mellow out a bit.
Jon,
Pitiful conditions when one is motivated to keep one's hands OFF the ladies.
I have always found quilted maple stunning. Could you please elaborate on its cause? I see very little of it here in the west. Is that simply because of its general rarity?
Thanks so much for sharing so generously. Any time I see a thread of this sort I look eagerly for your reply. I have another question about wood species, but will ask separately so as not to get off track here.
Cheers,
Greg
Greg, quilted figure seems to evolve out of bird's-eye as the eyes expand in diameter and begin to crowd each other. It is a relatively rare and much prized figure, but it's certainly not a Midwestern monopoly. Some of the prettiest quilted figure is cut from the Bigleaf maple, native to the Pacific Northwest. It could be that it only begins to develop as trees approach maximum maturity. If so, it would tend to be more plentiful in old-growth stands...and we certainly don't have much old-growth maple here in the Midwest anymore. The U.P. of Michigan is still famous for its bird's-eye, but it's now virtually all second-growth. The sad thing is, much of the old-growth hardwood in the U.P. was cut and converted to charcoal for smelting pig iron a century ago.
Do you think the Strads, etc., sound as good today as they did in the 18th century? I suppose there's a physics reason for not using fiberglass, plastic, or whatever for a string instrument.
Can trees be induced to produce desirable effects, just as oysters are made to produce cultured pearls?
We don't have any 18th Century recordings to go by, but I suspect the strads sound better today than they did when new. Stringed instruments are like fine wine, they tend to improve with age. As for replacing wood with synthectics in the making of quality violins, I think it will be awhile before the chemists come up with that one.
I'm unaware of any successful efforts in coaxing maples to produce special figure. In the case of oysters, we know that a grain of sand in their shell agrivates them enough to convert it into a pearl...But I guess we just don't know yet how to tick off a maple.
Edited 11/11/2002 6:48:59 PM ET by Jon Arno
Jon,
There have been a few mentions in this thread about ponded wood, as well as bog wood. My sawyer has ponded some madrone for 8 years or so, then cut and dried it and it came out perfect with no checking or cracking, as madrone tends to do normally.
What is the mechanism here? Does the anaerobic bacteria you mentioned elsewhere have something to do with it? Does the saturation somehow change the cell walls? Does it somehow modify the bound water versus the free water content, maybe equalizing it? Is it similar to the PEG treatment?
Also, in off-knots email, Dennis has described an unidentified wood he scrounged from some tree surgeons. He says about it:
"The wood is quite odd in that it's extremely wet, yet as it dries it resists cracking better than any other type of green wood I've worked
thus far although it does distort quite a bit. It's also very soft.
Would I be correct in making the observation that very soft woods
don't crack/check as badly as harder types?"
He's going to send me some twigs, if he can find any back at the site, so I can try to determine the species via one of my 3 PNW tree books. I'd be interested in your guess as to the identification of this wood.
--
Lee in Cave Junction, Oregon
On the Redwood Highway
Lee, I can't explain your madrone "miracle" with any certainty. That stuff is one of the least stable woods native to North America...and off hand I can't even think of an exotic that's much worse. However, I doubt if anaerobic bactera deserve the credit. They act very slowly...Eight years is a meaningful amount of time, but the transformation they cause usually takes decades, if not centuries to make a major difference, like taming the wild ways of madrone. The usual purpose for ponding logs is to protect them from aerobic decay agents, like molds and other fungi while they are waiting to be milled. I think the better guess is that some of the wood's extractives are water soluable (starches or possibly the gums, which tend to dissolve more easily than resins) and they were leached out. Anyway, it seems most likely that something was removed and its absence somehow allowed the wood to absorb stress better...but that's the only explanation I can offer. It certainly wouldn't be some sort of PEG effect, which is just the opposite...PEG puts plastic IN to the wood.
As for Dennis' theory that low density species are less likely to check, I suspect there is some correlation. The less dense species tend to have thinner cell walls which are more able to flex and thereby absorb some of the drying stress before failing. This certainly seems to be true with basswood. It has very high volumetric shrinkage, but doesn't experience a great deal of checking or distortion as it dries...and it is also more stable than its shrinkage stats would suggest it should be, once it is dry.
As for IDing the mystery wood, you might want to suggest to Dennis that he look for a leaf or whatever fruit the tree produced while he's searching for twigs. If it's something unusual or exotic, foliage samples will be the far better clue. The wood in twigs is typically juvenile tissue and not always a big help in pinning down the species.
Edited 11/13/2002 9:22:23 AM ET by Jon Arno
Edited 11/13/2002 9:36:27 AM ET by Jon Arno
When I asked for twigs from Dennis, I was referring to twigs with foliage attached, not the bare twigs. The leaf shape and pattern of attachment to the twig is a major ID aid. I wasn't looking to ID from the twig wood.
--
Lee in Cave Junction, Oregon
On the Redwood Highway
Don, you're absolutely right about our not knowing exactly what causes bird's-eye...but you're also probably right that it is somehow triggered by stress. The reason this appears to be so is that this abnormal tissue formation tends to occur more often in trees growing in stressful environments, i.e., toward the extremes of maple's natural range, at higher elevations, or among trees in dense stands where competitive pressure is greatest.
As for the anatomical structure of bird's- eye figure, the "eyes" appear to initiate as spots on the cambium layer where the tree does not produce growth (which suggests the sporatic absence of the plant growth hormone (auxin), except the condition seems to continue at the same location over successive years. In fact, if you look at a single bird's-eye in tangential cross section, the annual rings appear as nested "V's" or "cones"...so, the eyes typically increase in size as the tree continues to grow...eventually crowding each other and causing a "quilted" figure.
As far as I know, no specific pathogen has ever been associated with this tissue malformation, but if it were a virus, it would be hard to detect. Personally, I favor the theory that stress results in some sort of nutrient deprivation that prevents the tree from maintaining normal hormone balance uniformly along the cambium layer...but that's purely a guess...And the real question is, once the eye begins, why does that condition persist at the same location, growth season after growth season? It's one of wood tech's most fascinating mysteries.
I vaguely remember something about some of the logs recovered from the Great Lakes as having birdseyes as large as a quarter, and was not restricted to Maple. Included was Birch and Cherry.
Although the exact cause of curly and birds-eye grain is not known, the best theories I have heard are that curly grain is caused by windy growing conditions and birds-eye is caused by crowded growing conditions.
Stephen Shepherd
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