A fan favorite: Maple is a big hit with baseball players nationwide. It also ranks as one of the top choices for cabinetry, flooring and architectural millwork.

Family Name

Acer saccharum and Acer nigrum of the Family Aceraceae

Common Names

Hard maple, maple, rock maple, sugar maple, white maple, black maple.

Height/Weight

Some species of maple average 130 feet in height with diameters of 2 to 3 feet. Average seasoned weight is 45 pounds per cubic foot.

Properties

Maple dries slowly with little degrade. Shrinkage during seasoning can be large.

Wood has medium density, good bending and crushing strengths.

Pre-boring recommended when nailing and screwing.

Normally dose-grained, tough and stiff. Wood has uniform texture.

Wood machines well, turns well, glues satisfactorily and can be stained to a beautiful finish.

Woodworkers all across North America are stepping up to the plate when it comes to using maple.

A durable species, maple ranks as one of the top choices for professional baseball bats, with notables such as Joe Carter, Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols among its proponents. In fact, Bonds reportedly used a maple bat during the 2001 season when he hit 73 home runs.

Maple is also a favorite species for more traditional applications, including: furniture, cabinetry, flooring, sporting goods, architectural woodworking, butcher blocks, musical instruments and other types of specialty items.

The species' popularity in North America can be easily explained. Home grown and plentiful, maple offers good looks, strength and resistance to wear. Available in plain or fancy cuts, the wood has an innate luster and can be easily stained and finished. Figured maple also yields some very beautiful veneers, including bird's-eye maple, fiddle-back, curly, blistered and mottled figures.

Hard maples yield wood that is cream white in color with a reddish tinge. Some of the largest of the trees also can have a dark brown heart. Hard maples, or rock maples as they are also called, often have a straight grain. However, they also can have a curly or wavy grain that produces a wonderful pattern.

In Encyclopedia of Wood, the species of Acer are noted for being easily stained woods. "More plain grained timber from the Aceraceae are favored for their acceptance of stain, not just in the grey-stained veneer known as harewood, but also in more dramatically bright and unusual colors; these have found popularity among some contemporary furniture designers, and of course, they always work well in children's toys and furniture," the authors report.

Cold-Weather Friend

Ironically, considering its popularity for baseball bats, maple is often called a "cold-weather tree," favoring a northerly climate. Much of the hard maple is grown in the Great Lakes region, Appalachians, Northwest United States and Canada.

Botanists divide the maple family of North America into two subcategories: hard maple and soft maple. According to Albert Constantine Jr. in Know Your Woods, there are more than 20 different species of maple found in the United States, including: black, broadleaved, fig leaf, hard, Oregon red, rock, fiver, rough, scarlet, silver, soft and sugar. According to Constantine, sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is the most abundant and important of the maples found in the United States.

The Hardwood Export Trade Council, in its booklet Hardwoods of the United States, notes that five of the maple species native to the United States are important commercially for timber--two in the hard maple category and three in the soft maple category. Sugar maple and black maple (Acer nigrum) are the hard maples. The soft maples of note for commercial purposes include red maple (Acer rubrum), silver maple (Acer saccharinum) and boxelder (Acer negundo). Boxelder is the least-used of the soft maples.

The well-known sugar maples get their name because they are the source of maple sugar and syrup. A single sugar maple tree can produce up to 12 gallons of sap a year. It takes 35 to 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of pure syrup.

More maple Facts

Soft maples grow throughout the Eastern United States and also on the West Coast, where they are known as bigleaf maples. In many ways, soft maple is the equivalent of hard maple. Although soft maple is typically about 25 percent less hard, it is often used as a substitute for hard maple and beech.

In the Encyclopedia of Trees, by Hugh Johnson, maples are praised for offering the "most beautiful and varied foliage of all the broadleaves."

Another maple of note is the Japanese maple, which is also known as Acer mono. The tree is native to Japan and is used for a variety of purposes, among them: flooring material for high traffic areas, industrial settings, roller skating rinks, dance halls, squash courts and bowling alleys. Japanese maple is also used for rollers in textile mills, piano parts, sporting goods and shoe lasts.

Editor's note: 136 Wood of the Month articles are now online, with more coming soon. Visit the Wood of the Month archive at www.iswonline.com.