Exotic Wood walnut, black

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WALNUT, BLACK

Juglans nigra
Juglans nigra of the family Juglandaceae, the walnut family

A commonly available, reasonably inexpensive high quality wood that can be rather plain but can also have great beauty, and always has high dimensional stability, the combination of those properties making it a prized wood for architectural millwork and high grade furniture such as breakfronts. It is also widely used for low end rifle stocks because in addition to its handsome looks in that use, it has an unusually high shock resistance, giving it an excellent ability to withstand recoil. High end rifle stocks are more frequently made from other walnuts, such as claro, that have similar physical properties but even greater beauty (and correspondingly higher cost).

The sapwood is not particularly attractive in color but is otherwise pretty much identical in properties to the heartwood, so the wood is sometimes boiled or steamed to leach the heartwood color into the sapwood but this slightly degrades the color quality of the heartwood.

my samples: colors are generally accurate throughout (some color correction was needed, but not much --- walnut is not a hard wood to get good pictures of)

Three planks --- middle one is light chocolate color and has a little curl, top one is grayish, bottom one is "standard" black walnut color

plank

planks

the other end of the upper of the two planks directly above, and a closeup

planks

plank

planks

plank

planks

plank and closeup --- the light gray color is accurate

plank and two closeups --- the light gray color is accurate

several planks; both levels of enlargement are available, colors are accurate and show some of the variety available in black walnut

planks with accurately shown gray color

plank with accurately shown brown color with a faint reddish tinge

quartersawn planks --- grayish color is accurate

pair of planks and a closeup --- the grain on the closeup is much more accurate in the enlargements

pair of planks and a closeup

the upper two pieces are thin planks and the lower 2 are veneer.

a short piece off of a turning stick

plank and end grain

end grain closeup of the piece directly above

plank and end grain. This one is a particularly rich-looking piece of black walnut and has none of the gray color that sometimes occurs in this species and that is very common when it is steamed.

end grain closeup of the piece directly above --- sanding scratches are very heavy

sample plank and end grain --- the color correction put just a shade too much red in the pic --- the color of the end grain closeup below is correct.

end grain closeup of the piece directly above

slab

plank

thins

a set of walnut slats. I can't tell for sure, but given the gray color of many of the slats in this batch, I suspect that this is steamed walnut.

walnut plank and end grain. This was mistakenly believed to be butternut by Tom Denave who sent it to me in the hopes I could identify it for sure. We had it on the mystery page for a while but Tom sent it to the USDA and it was identified as American black walnut (Juglans nigra). These two pics show an orange tint that is not in the wood

end grain closeup of the piece directly above --- color is very accurate

a black walnut crotch area. This is very dense and the fine-sanded area on the right is smooth as glass, unlike the normal somewhat grainy surface of walnut.

crotch plank that I bought to cut up and use in my bowls. There is a major bark inclusion which would make the plank a poor choice for many project but for my bowls, I'll just cut out pieces around it.

both sides of a crotch piece donated by Jim Glynn (thanks, Jim).

plank with a crotch area and a closeup

crotch-area planks and a closeup

cortch plank and end grain --- this was cut from the larger plank directly above and then sanded for the pics. The color is NOT correct --- it is missing the orange tint that is correctly shown in the full-plank pic above.

end grain closeup of the piece directly above

another plank from the same tree as the crotch-plank pair above

crotch veneer --- some of these shots are enlargements of the shot next to them. The red tint on the first pic is exaggerated.

flame crotch veneer sheet --- some vendors would call this a feather crotch, others will call it a flame crotch.

striped, figured veneer and plain veneer. Note that the plain veneer has a small amount of sapwood showing on the bottom, which indicates that it is NOT steamed walnut. Colors are accurate.

flat cut black walnut veneer

curly black walnut veneer with accurate color

veneer sheet and closeup

veneer with accurate color and the normal graininess of walnut.

veneer with accurate color. This was an unusually smooth piece.

veneer with accurate color and some sapwood a the top. The gray color of this piece is more typical of steamed black walnut but the sapwood indicates that this is not steamed.

burl veneer --- the grain and color varieties in walnut burls are so extensive that no amount of examples can really be thought of as fully representative, so just take these as some random samples of the kind of thing you'll see in walnut burls. Claro walnut burls tend to be more colorful than these black walnut burls.

sapwood burl veneer --- you can just see the heartwood area in the lower right corner.

another veneer, just showing the never-ending variety of grain and color that is avalailable in walnut

and yet another veneer, this one with some curl in the figure

fiddleback veneer

a bunch of black walnut burl pieces, showing only a small amount of the variety that is available with these burls.
Some of these are claro walnut --- I'll separate them out eventually

black walnut burl veneer

a couple of book-matched burl veneer pairs

bookmatched veneer pair with a particularly rich color and nice sheen --- color is very accurate --- take a look at this on at the 2nd enlargement --- very nice indeed

although this one came with a large batch of miscellaneous walnut burl veneer, it looks suspeciously like carpathian elm burl to me.

web pics

slab

flat cut planks

flat cut planks and closeup

quartersawn planks --- quartersawn walnut is less common that flat cut simply becuase walnut is considerably more attractive as a flat cut due to the very common cathedral grain.

listed as a stump piece, this is the least figured stump piece of walnut I've ever seen

figured plank --- I've never encountered a board this dark but I can't say it's impossible; it just seems very unusual

figured planks

figured

two turning blocks and a turning round

crotch planks

crotch plank pair and closeup

bookmatched crotch planks

flat cut veneer

quartersawn veneer

sapwood veneer

curly planks

quilted plank

pen blanks --- some are sapwood, thus the light color, but I don't believe the red/orange color nor the brightness of the yellow in the sapwood. This is the kind of unrealistic picture that got me started on this web site in the first place.

curly veneer

fiddleback veneer

figured veneer

quartersawn figured veneer

quartersawn figured plank

mottled veneer

razor mottle veneer

quartersawn mottled veneer

this piece was advertised as a "flame burl", but it doesn't look like a burl to me, it looks like a crotch, and the color is very strange.

speckled veneer --- enlarge it and you'll see a bird's eye type figure

"angel step" veneer

stump veneer --- angel step veneer is generally stump veneer

angel step veneer quartermatched

quilted veneer

flat cut quilted veneer

flat cut quilted veneer and closeup

crotch veneer

flame crotch (bookmatched) and curly crotch bookmatched (sort of) veneer

bookmatched swirl veneer

quartermatched swirl veneer

guitar back matched pair of thin wood

burls

a burl that is in a crotch which, to me, sounds either obscene or dangerous or both, but hey, what do I know?.

burl veneer

bookmatched burl veneer

quartermatched burl veneer

cluster burl veneer

burl veneer with sapwood

sapwood burl veneer --- the pink color on the second piece is doubtful

bowl with what appears to be very accurate color

bowl --- the color is probably a little too orange

two views of a bowl

a single turning sample, showing the same crotch from different angles. No color correction was done and the pictures are darker and significantly more red than the wood, which is much more gray than what you see here. The coating is polyurethane (several coats).
note to self --- do a color corrected picture