red or white oak, end grain pores plugged ?

[chainsaw_louie]

Hi

We fell this tree several years ago,it's been laying in the shade and I just got around to milling it.  My recollection is that it was white oak but because of the color of the lumber, it looks like red oak to me .  While I recall it had leaves with rounded points that memory is no longer clear.

What remains of the bark also looks like white oak bark: grey with horizontal breaks in the vertical strips.

I attempted to magnify and photograph the end grain to see if I could tell the distinctive feature of white oak: pores plugged with tyloses but I couldn't get a sharp enough image.

Also , is that bad of brown wood rot or pre-rot, it doesn't seem soft but something is different about it's quality than the hard pink wood.


Here are my pictures, what do you think .. red or white oak.

The bark:


 

The wood:


 

 

 

 

[scsmith42]

Chestnut white oak is open pored.  Your bark is somewhat similar to it.

As to red versus white oak, if you study the medullary rays visible in either flat sawn or rift sawn boards, if a number of them are longer than 3/4" it's an indicator of white oak.  Red oak rays usually will be shorter than 3/4".

[Don P]

The bottom end grain shot and the bark looks like white to me. The brown is incipient if not full blown decay. 

I had a similar experience a few years ago. I had sawed a really nice white oak into stair parts for a set of heavy timber stairs. A friend needed white oak stair treads in 5/4 these were 4" thick but I let him have it all for a song, he resawed it and then asked why I sold him red oak. I knew it was white but wasn't going to argue, I asked if it matched his floor, it did not. Case closed IMO doesn't matter what it is, it doesn't match. I refunded and then we found some other wood. I worked the mystery wood up later, when the saw hit it the smell said "white" when I scanned the end grain it said white, WDH said white... but the color said red. That was all that mattered the day it mattered.

[chainsaw_louie]

In this case we are making a deck for a hay wagon so want the rot resistance of white oak. 



 

[E.Schamell]

I'm going with regular white oak here. No way that bark belongs to anything in the red oak family. Not red, black, scarlet, pin, etc. I've gotten plenty of white that had that pink hue, freshly cut. The bark varies quite a bit with age and site conditions.   

[Ron Scott]

White oak.

[scsmith42]

In this case we are making a deck for a hay wagon so want the rot resistance of white oak.

It is my understanding that Chestnut White Oak is not rot resistant, because it is an open pored white oak.
If you use it for the trailer, if you soak it in used ATF or hydraulic oil (or new) it will preserve it quite a bit, w/o the carcinogens or soot associated with used engine oil.

[moodnacreek]

Chestnut [rock] oak was locally considered rot resistant. The swamp white not so much.

[Don P]

Chestnut Oak | The Wood Database (Hardwood) (wood-database.com)
That was not a chestnut oak above, just a regular white. But do notice they are calling it highly decay resistant.

I was looking but can't find a reference other than myself of another common name being "Sill Oak". 

[scsmith42]

@stavebuyer Is chestnut white oak used for barrels?

[stavebuyer]

Chesnut oak is not acceptable for wet cooperage. Post Oak is also avoided. 

[scsmith42]

Chesnut oak is not acceptable for wet cooperage. Post Oak is also avoided.

That's what I thought, due to the fact that it is open pored like red oak.
I've never understood that some wood databases indicate that it is rot resistant, since it is open pored.  The tyloses in close pored white oak contribute to it's rot resistance.

[Don P]

Decay resistance isn't just the impermeability of the the cells, the extractives play a major role. 
I tried |"quercus montana, decay resistance" and got hits, one good looking article behind a paywall  :.
I haven't delved into this deeply but there was an interesting looking table in there with chestnut oak at the top of whites in decay resistance.
PDF (usda.gov)

[Don P]

I got bored and skipped to the end, here's a couple of notable quotables.

Wood of the white oak group on the average was substantially more resistant to decay than that of the red oak group. This is in agreement with the general experience that species of the red oak group are not suited to uses involving considerable decay hazard. Species of the white oak group were not uniformly resistant to decay, however, and some commercial distinction among them as to durability may be warranted. The most resistant of these species was chestnut oak; next in order of decreasing resistance were Oregon white oak, white oak (Quercus alba), and swamp chestnut oak. There was no evidence of practical differences in resistance among the three species of the red oak group, namely, black oak, northern red oak, and scarlet oak. Individual trees of the same species, of approximately the same size, and in the same locality differed markedly from one another in resistance. This was true of all four species examined, but especially so of white and swamp chestnut oaks. 


This variability in resistance among trees appeared to be attributable more to genetic differences than to differences in the environment of the trees. The possibility presents itself, therefore, of selecting and propagating oak trees with wood having not only a longer but also a more uniform service-life expectancy. The outer heartwood of white oak {Quercus alba) trees in the approximately even-aged stand studied for this relation was higher in decay resistance as the d. b. h. of the trees was larger. In three species of the white oak group and in northern red oak the resistance to decay by two brown rot fungi and a white pocket rot fungus was progressively lower from the outermost heartwood to the pith. This trend occurred in both the basal and the upper portion of the trunks. Radial differences in resistance to decay by three other fungi, all white rotters, were generally smaller, and in white oak an opposite trend was indicated by two of the fungi. The differences with respect to the first three test fungi were large enough to account for very considerable differences in the service life of wood from different parts of large logs. In fact, some of the central heartwood of the white oak trees was no more resistant than that of northern red oak wood. This finding might be considered further justification for the common discrimination against boxed hearts (log centers) for such purposes as boat timbers. In the same four species the heartwood in the upper trunks was, with one exception, more resistant to all the fungi than that in the lower trunks. In the swamp chestnut oak this difference was exhibited in resistance to the two brown rot fungi and the white pocket rot fungus, but not in resistance to the three typical white rotters. Heartwood of the top log might be expected, therefore, to remain serviceable as long as wood from other parts of an oak tree and probably substantially longer than central heartwood from the larger, basal log