DIYbanter - View Single Post - Is horse chestnut wood good for anything?

Steve Turner

wrote:
It looks like we are going to have to a large horse chestnut tree
taken out. Is the wood good for anything?

If so, who might want it?

The trunk is about 2-3 feet across near the bottom. It looks like
there might be some interesting burl-like pieces in several places.

None of the tree books I have that describe Horsechestnut say anything
about the properties of the lumber, but they do say that it's an
"introduced" member of the Buckeye family, native to Asia and
southeastern Europe. However, "The Encyclopedia of Wood" by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture has this to say about Buckeye:

========
Buckeye consists of two species, yellow buckeye (Aesculus octandra) and
Ohio buckeye (a. glabra). These species range from the Appalachians of
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina westward to Kansas, Oklahoma,
and Texas. Buckeye is not customarily separated from other species when
manufactured into lumber and can be used for the same purposes as aspen
(Populus), basswood (Tilia), and sapwood of yellow-poplar (Liriodendron
tulipifera).

The white sapwood of buckeye merges gradually into the creamy or
yellowish white heartwood. The wood is uniform in texture, generally
straight grained, light in weight, weak when used as a beam, soft, and
low in shock resistance. It is rated low on machinability such as
shaping, mortising, boring, and turning.

Buckeye is suitable for pulping for paper; in lumber form, it has been
used principally for furniture, boxes and crates, food containers,
wooden ware, novelties, and planing mill products.
========

Based on all that, I don't think I would bother having it milled...

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