Nieghbors big maple broke

[Sparrow]

Neighbors big maple broke. If I cut it up,I could have all the bow wood. Cut it yesterday,splitting it today.Got half of it split out,do the rest tomorrow. Here's pictures of so far. Don't know what kind of maple it is.Real smooth bark.

[Dauntless]

Try and get a leaf if you can, it's the best way of identifiying species.  Otherwise it could be silver, red, or vine maple.

[Bevan R.]

I think we can rule out vine maple. I ain't never seen a vine maple bigger than 8" across.

[Lone500]

only maples ive ever seen like that are really old.

[Sparrow]

Here's a shot of the bark

[Mangeur de lard]

With a closeup of the buds you can ID maple. Just by the bark I'd go with red, sugar, silver or Norwegian maple.

[blackhawk]

that looks like red maple to me....its def not sugar(hard) maple

[hammerstone]

definately red. i just tapped several of mine.

[gstoneberg]

Dang, tapping maple trees and making maple syrup is one of the few things I miss after moving to Texas.

George

[Sparrow]

So how does red maple rate as bow wood ?  '  Frank

[fishfinder401]

its not the best, but from my experiences it will work pretty good, especially for normal weights( like i would know anything about those )

[Bevan R.]

I would say you have a pretty good stash. It ain't yellow but you got stuff you can make bend. Well done splitting that beast.

[Sparrow]

It split pretty nicely. Much easier than Black locust.  '  Frank

[Matt S.]

Red Maple isn't as strong as Sugar/Rock/Hard Maple but it should still make a good bow in the 40-50# range. You'll just have to make the limbs a bit wider or longer.
I made a sweet shooting 62" maple board bow. I'm not sure what species of Maple it was but I'm sure it wasn't one of the hard maples.

That's one nice haul! There should be a lot of great bows in there.

[Onebowonder]

I have a couple of "not hard Maple" logs as well but wasn't sure if they were worthy of effort or not. 

If I put them into a two lam bow, does the maple do better in tension or compression?  The other wood I would have to pair it with would be either Bamboo or Hickory...  (I don't mean to highjack, I just happen to have some similar type/species of wood to work with...)