Identifying parquet wood?

[Michael Kilpatrick]

I am trying to identify exactly what wood was used (in 1961) to make the parquet block floor in our hall and living room, so that we can extend the hall fairly seamlessly into the extension.

It doesn't look like oak to me - the grain is far too fine, surely - so it may be one of any number of odd African hardwoods.

Can anyone tell by a photograph?

anything the exposure is a fraction on the light side, but you can see, thanks to the piece of furniture placed deliberately in the shot, that the parquet is a little darker and a little more on the red-brown side than teak veneer.

Any suggestions?

Michael

[John Whitworth]

When my dad re-varnished their parquet floor of the same period, I seem to remember that the wooden blocks came up far lighter after sanding. So the colour as shown is probably not that applicable - you would want a lighter wood, then the trick would be matching the varnish, surely? It might just be simpler to sand and refinish the whole floor once extended.

As for the actual wood - not sure - the grain in one of those looks almost psychedelic. But I'm sure that using your photo, a parquet floor 'shop' could probably find you some with a suitable grain - and probably advise on the colouring too - though I can't imagine that they would stock more than one type of the old style/size parquet to be honest. Would a reclamation shop perhaps be a good place to look? Or are there any old schools being pulled down nearby?

[Stuart Noble]

Not unlike this, which is elm

[andrew]

An american maple?

I remember being amazed at the old BR coaches, which had a deep red surface on inside window and door frames, being sycamore and when the panels were replaced on the Bluebell railway they where white.

AJH

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well it doesn't look totally like oak, no, but on the other hand it doesn't look tropical either, Most tropical wood does NOT have such marked figuring as growth is constant through the year.

It might be oak stained red..you need to sand off a bity and see what the real colour is. It might be elm too. Looks a bit elm like.

Or even stained maple. A lot of that wavy figuring looks very like the maples I used to use on guitar necks.

If I were you, I wouldn't even try to get a match, I would make a solid wood threshold set in flush with the parquet to end the old house - oak is nice - and then continue with a deferential parquet in the new section.

Its not a bug, its a feecha

[The Natural Philosopher]

Interesting that all of us have suggested elm and maple.

maple parquetting is still available - I have seen it somewhere.

Elm is completely out though.

New maple might match if the old and new were sanded down to bare wood, and refinished.

[Bolted]

it doesn't look anything at all like oak.

od does NOT have such

Eh? It's just crown cut grain, not some 'marked figure'. That's just as common in any african hardwood as in any european hardwood, and is just a function of the way it has been sawn. It looks like an tropical hardwood to me, and given the date, it probably was.

[The Natural Philosopher]

does NOT have such

I bow to your superior arrogance.

[Bolted]

OK. It will help everyone hear you talk out of your arse more clearly.

[Michael Kilpatrick]

does NOT have such

Thanks for all the comments. I have to agree with Bolted. It looks to me more like some sort of tropical hardwood, but what exactly, I don't know.

I emailed my photograph to a flooring company and they replied saying "It looks to me like it is a Genuine Teak Woodblock". Despite the fact that I pointed out it was quite a different shade from the teak furniture which I placed in the photograph for reference. It's too dark for teak.

Then again, the photograph of the Elm, that Stuart Noble directed us to in his posting, looks reasonably similar if I allow for sanding and polishing and a possible lightening of the shade a little.

As for maple, I've no idea. Oh, bleargh, this is frustrating...

Michael

[mark]

Go into Google Images and look at Cherry wood and see if that looks like it.

't rule out teak just yet, just because it isn't the same shade as a known sample of teak.

It is not oak, ash, beech, elm.

mark

[neverwas]

I do appreciate that it is for you - though for bystanders it is actually quite interesting. So interesting in fact that I tried Google Images for teak parquet flooring. The results

included several with what look to my untutored eye good enough images to be worth a closer comparison with your photos by you or others with a better eye.

[Dave Liquorice]

But is under n layers of varnish/polish/wax that will have darkened with age/collected gunk. To really identify what a particular lump of wood is needs very close examination without any treatments.

We have a table, some of the markings are Beech like, it has pores in the dense grain like Oak, the figuring is similar to Elm... We think it might be actually be Ash...

Given this floors age I'd still go for teak. Bearing mind that that coffee table is venered and veneer has a very different look to real solid lump of teak. Veneer is made by rotating a log and taking a continuous shaving off it, not simply planing a block.

[Stuart Noble]

It should also be photographed outdoors in good natural light for any sort of accurate representation of colour. We know how digital cameras interpret tungsten lighting

[Andy Dingley]

50 years old - the exact same species probably isn't available. If it is, it's probably significantly different now from how it was then, owing to different growing conditions. If it is the same, then it's probably virgin forest clearance rather than plantation and you shouldn't be using it either.

If it was imported into the UK post-war, then that's always a pretty safe bet. "Africa" also means Western equatorial coast, because Ghana, Nigeria etc. were the countries that we traded with, rather than the French or the Portugese.

Usually takes three of them (one on each axis) and they have to be almost micrographs too.

If you're a USA-ian, their forest products lab will do it for free. There are also books like Bruce Hoadley's which are easy to follow self-identification guides for a whole range of species - nearly all US natives though! If you're an obsessional collector of old woodworking books (whistles), you'll have a shelf of titles like "Commonwealth timber marketing board handbook of stuff we get from those funny brown chaps overseas, then we mis-spell their names". The '50s vintage of these are usually good quality glossy, but black & white, photos so aren't easy to work with either.

On the whole, I'd assume the art of the possible. Take one (or photo) along to the seller of blocks and see what they have to sell. Knowing the exacxt species wouldn't help you much anyway, if you don't have anywhere to buy more of it.

Also check recyclers. There's a lot of old school parquet flooring from demolitions of early '60s school buildings, and it's probably the closest you'll get.

[Andy Dingley]

Growth is constant, but not consistent. Big rainforest tropicals, not having the seasonal variation to encourage the early-/late-wood differences, develop their own concentric rings of reversing spiral grain, just for stiffness and strength. This is the cause of the striping that's so obvious in sapele etc.

Small tropicals and equatorials also see seasonal variation (mostly in rainfall) so they show much the same variations that we're familiar with, although for rainfall reasons rather than temperature.

This looks like ring figure (and it is figure, not grain) though, and it's small scale, so it's probably from smaller trees rather than the big canopy trees.

Also, why is elm completely out? There are plenty of elms around, they grow as well as they ever did - it's just that when they're tall enough, the beetles find them and kill them off. Talk to the right people and you can get elms, you just can't get it in a particularly useful size. It would make parquet though.

Just a year or two back I was working elm in boards a few feet across, for a restoration project. It wasn't cheap in that size, as bog, old, wide elm certainly is hard to find - but it's still out there, if you have the money.

[Andy Dingley]

It could be teak, but it would be crappy modern small-growth teak, not the big old stuff that would have been available back then. Much "teak" nowadays is just plain nasty (look at that garden furniture): even though it's the same species botanically, the resultant timber is nothing like it.

Which isn't to say that the teak on the shelf in the parquet shop might not be a good match.

Colour is the least of your worries. You can change that. The most important match is that ring figure (the big stuff), to get the shapes and the texture through each ring to match. Secondly is the grain, the smaller-scale stuff between the rings.

[Bolted]

I have a shed full of panga-panga (or possibly wenge) parquet, which has just has much or more crown cut figure on a similar scale (yeah ok, figure, my real point was that the figure in that photo is not proof that it is not a tropical hardwood, because that is just nonsense).

Muhuhu

panga Teak Teak subject to caveat that Lassco may not have full provenance, but none of it is domestic timber, that's for sure.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I didn't claim different. But tropical grain is quite different from temperate grain, and that wood looks very temperate. its rare to see knots in tropical timber also. Rain forest wood is all straight up and a crown at the top.

I've only seen grain/figure (whatever it is) like that in elm and maple. Never in sapele and its cousins, or even oak. Not in ash, not in lime/bass or beech. Chestnut maybe, and possible fruiot - I have no experience with cherry and its ilk tho.

Parquet that I HAVE come across has been one of oak, some sort of tropical mahogany style, teak and maple. I've never seen beech, elm, birch, chestnut or indeed anything much else, as the above are the woods that are hard, and take the punishment. And after staining varnishing and decades of dirt and floor wax, they all end up the same sort of dark reddish brown anyway.

There's figure AND grain.

I think the problem is that everyone is talking 'coloor' but its most likely stained anyway.

Not round here it wouldn't.

The trees get to about 4" diameter and die. Most of the elm I have seen for sale is either old stock, or recycled.

indeed, the latter being very much the point.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Panga panga

Burmese Teak

Rhodesian Teak

I'll concur that teak is very possible. It was cheap and very fashionable 30 years ago.

Whether or not teak is actually 'tropical' in the same sense as tropical rain forest wood, is another matter ;-)

Burma is thoroughly monsoon, and has extreme variations in rainfall. It is IIRC strictly subtropical. As is Rhodesia.