Is this hophornbeam? NOPE, its cedar elm.

[k-hat]

Took home a haul of wood last weekend in my downtime, nearly kilt myself! Anyhow, the three on the left are cedar (the middle one is pole straight and hardly any knots!), but the rest is all the same and my best guess is hop hornbeam, but i'm not sure.  Whatchall think?

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Sorry for the crappy foliage pic:
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Thanks y'all!

[H Rhodes]

I am not sure from those pics, but they look more like slippery elm to me.

[soy]

Red elm...aka minnesoda osage

[k-hat]

Elm was my second choice, but i knew it wasn't the cedar elm that i'm used to.

I love elm so that's a good thing!

[soy]

here are some HHB leaves very similar

[autologus]

The logs looked like red elm to me.

Grady

[Dances with squirrels]

Can you post a couple of better pictures of the bark of a few of them?

[Del the cat]

Isn't Hornbeam white all the way through?
The only stuff I've seen in UK is...
Del

[soy]

The stuff we have here in mn. Has heart wood kind of a tan color similar to hickory

[osage outlaw]

Have fun splitting that elm 

[TRACY]

Not HHB. If you want to know before you cut, get one of the many tree id books for your part of the country and it'll take the guess work right out it and make life easy

Tracy

[k-hat]

I have a really good tree id book, the only thing it's missing is pics of the cross-section!  The foliage and bark of elm and hhb are very similar in the pics, so that was the difficulty.   I would post a better pic of the leaves, but soy already did!  That's exactly what my leaves looked like, double serrated, etc.  The rest of the foliage is long since gone, so that would have helped.  From what i could see it was a toss-up between elm and hhb, but the bark didn't look like elm i'd cut before, and once i cut it the heartwood was WAY bigger than in my cedar elm.  Hadn't seen hhb cut before, so there ya go.

Both are great woods so i went on and cut

Here is a pic of the bark:


OO I don't know what all the fuss is about splitting elm ,  maybe i just don't know what "easy splitting" is like

Thanks for the input guys, glad i've got some elm, it's what i was actually looking for

[k-hat]

I have just learned me the lesson of how hard splitting elm can be.  Don't know what the diff was between my previous harvest (last year) and this, but I just spent an hour solid splitting a SINGLE log into quarters   What a beast (the log that is). 

When the split started, the distinct smell of cedar wafted up to my nose, and a big ol' grin spread on my face.  It is indeed my beloved cedar elm.  Having only harvested cedar elm once I was unsure,  but there was no mistaking it now.  I didn't realize it could have so much heartwood (one large log only has about a 1/2" of sapwood.).  Mystery solved  

Looking forward to seeing what i can make out of these babies!

[dwardo]

Just a little input on heart/sap wood ratio. I have seen a complete distinct variation in the ratio of all the woods I have cut. Elm, yew, laburnum, cherry, all of the them have been very different from tree to tree. Its all down to the growing conditions including the amount of light, the nutrients, soil type etc etc.

I have had yew with almost no heartwood at all to the joy of 1/4 inch sapwood and all heart. Same with elm.

[crooketarrow]

  Thats diffenty elm I've made 5 or 6 elm bows with little to no heart wood. They were all fine. I've only made one bow of only heart wood belly split.. It was  a shooter,fast, light, good cast, wish I'd had kept it. But I feel that way over a lot of bows.