They generally look to me like they would be hard to mill. I don't think I've ever seen one that wasn't crooked and low-branched. Sort of like an incredibly enormous bonsai. I've run across some huge ones, and I'd say some up to 150' across. Better than 100' easily in any case. Have an acorn from one right here in my pocket, actually.
Poplar, probably.
I have a couple of planes made of liveoak. It seems to be excellent for that. They are hard and dense, compared to the usual beech.
Both were user made, not from a factory.
Rodney Myrvaagnes J36 Gjo/a
"In this house we _obey_ the laws of thermodynamics." --Homer Simpson
I've never worked live oak, but I will point out it was an important resource for ship construction back in the days of sail. I believe you will find a lot of it in the Old Iron Sides.
Sorry, I got confused with a living Oak tree!!
Jaqy
Mike Daly responds:
Tanoak, AKA live oak. Hell, if the world can't confuse you with aliases for tree names, what CAN it do?
But it's also a member of the beech family that contains oaks.
Charlie Self
"Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal." Alexander Hamilton
My grandmother and her neighbors have several down their road. In fact, the road splits twice to go around two huge live oaks. The lady across the street from my grandma has two live oaks in her yard that a guy-who-knows-a-buttload-about-trees (what's that guy called, anyway?) looked at and were aged at over 400 years. They both have trunks of about 6 feet in diameter and a dripline of easily 150'. Pretty humbling, if you ask me. These trees were granddaddies before our nation was born. Dang.
-Phil Crow
Not only is it evergreen, but it's deciduous too. It loses leaves, and grows new ones, continuously.
-- Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)
How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?
Kinda gets to you. Some of the sequoias were there before Christ was born, too (life expectancy of 2000 to 3000 years). Not too long ago, some live oaks were estimated to be 800+ years old. That was recently revised downward, but the experts still say there are a number over 300 years of age.
Charlie Self
"Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal." Alexander Hamilton
On 14 Dec 2003 05:43:19 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (Phil Crow) brought forth from the murky depths:
Anal Arborist, maybe?
That's the kind of tree that makes you all weak-in-the-knees like.
-- Save the Endangered ROAD NARROWS! -|-
Well, so do pine trees for that matter. Just look in Mom's swimming pool.
373 cubic miles of pine needles fall into the thing every twelve seconds this time of year.(I wonder where my son gets his propensity for exaggeration?)
Yeah it is, and one of the things that makes being a woodworker hard for me. Somewhere there's a logger going "hot damn, look at all the board feed in
*that* thing!"Fascinating thread! Out here on the west coast, we have three dominant species of live oak; the Coast Live Oak (quercus agrifola), the Interior Live Oak (q. wislizenii) and the Engelmann Oak (q. engelmanii). As you might expect in SoCal, they frequently interbreed, so crosses and hybrids are quite common. Conventional wisdom says the wood is not workable-- too hard and moves too much, with short trunks which do not yeild boards of any notable length. However, I have had a great deal of success with it for smaller pieces and accents. One piece I found has an intense fiddleback figure, and when quarter-sawn, a truly spectacular flecking. I'm saving this for something special. Another piece of downed wood had sat in the mulch so long that the tannin had reacted with the wood and turned the bottom few inches into what is essentially bog oak. Now, that's flashy! I personally am a fan of this neglected wood, although I wouldn't try to use it for casework. And if all else fails, it makes great, and I mean great barbecue!
I know a prof who says he "embroiders the mundane cloth of veracity with the golden thread of fabrication." Sounds better that way.
-- Mark
Hrm... Me likey. I'll have to remember that.
No it isn't. It is either deciduous or evergreen. Deciduous in reference to trees essentially means that all the leaves fall off if a particular season, it doesn't just mean the leaves fall off while others continue to grow which they do do on pines.
I don't know how many times you have to say it Charlie before everybody gets the picture (name) but Quercus virginiana it is. Tree names are a bitch because there are scientific names (thank God) then there are the common names used by foresters, lumber/timber industry, and finished wood or furniture industry, so that you can easily have 3 names for the same thing, but just to confuse everyone, the same name is often used for different woods. Then in the U.S. you often have to include the coast, e.g., western red cedar (which isn't a real cedar anyway).
My book shows 5 live oaks, Q. virginiana (the subject tree that grows only on the east/southern coast); Q. chrysolepsis (canyon live oak); Q. wislizenii (interior live oak); and Q agrifolia (California live oak). All of them are evergreen and the last four grow only on the west coast.
To make matters worse there is also the Sand Live Oak Q.geminata and the Laurel Oak Q.laurifolia or Q.hemisphaerica that are commonly lumped into "live oak" category in Florida. You have to look closely to tell the difference.
snipped-for-privacy@aol.comnotforme (Charlie Self) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m13.aol.com:
You are mistaken here - shipwrights would try to find crotches, etc, shaped close to what they needed because the grain would follow the curve they were trying to form, thus resulting in a much stronger piece.
The rest of what you wrote is about right, tho. Very hard to work, prone to radically changing shape while drying, and not very pretty to look at.
Best use for one would be to sell it to someone who cuts lumber for wooden boat builders. There's still a need for natural knees and crooks in that field.
John
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