Wingnut Tree

[randman]

Ayone here tried  using wingnut? (yes it's a real tree and not just a political cartoon). My neighbor gave me a piece a couple of years ago(which I proceeded to ruin by getting too agressive with the bandsaw - doh! )  He thought it was black locust because the heartwood color (dark greenish brown) and density looks like locust with a white sapwood. It has small pods like honey locust but the bark looks nothing like locust and there are no thorns.....The tree guy who came recently to remove the whole tree said it was some kind of ash...the bark and leaves look similar to some ash varieties but ash doesn't have locust like pods with multiple seeds....A little research and I found out it was wingnut - related to black walnut. I have a big pile of it now and trying to decide if I should treat it like walnut and use the under bark surface as the back or to treat it like Locust and remove the sapwood down to the first couple of heartwood rings.....May just have to experiment with a couple of pieces to see unless someone has some insight for me.

[Springbuck]

  Never heard of it.  Sounds like fine wood to me, though.  And pretty.  If it is actually related to black walnut, that means it's related to hickories and pecans, and if the wood is strong and dense, sounds like a winner.

  The trees in the pics I googles sure are gnarly old dogs.

[DarkSoul]

Caucasian wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) is indeed a tree in the walnut family Juglandaceae. Its species name 'fraxinifolia' actually means 'with ash-like leaves', so it makes sense that the guy who removed the tree thought it was ash.
You can Google quite a bit of useful information about physical and mechanical properties of wood if you use the scientific name. I quickly found that its SG is only 0.45 and that the wood is rather weak. It does not sound like a true bow wood to me, but if the wood is straight grained and was for free...go ahead.

[randman]

Well now I'm wondering if what I have is actually wingnut......When I did a search with the scientific name, the tree that shows up has leaves that look the same but the seed pods/clusters are nothing like what I have and you get the idea where they got the name because the pods look like wingnut.....This is where I got the idea it was wingnut:http://www.echotadeerclanwest.com/pages/World%20Around%20us/Plant%20Identification/Trees/wingnut.htm and it looks like what I have.... the attached are pics of mine....

[randman]

You can see the crazy reflex from the reaction wood when split (splits incredibly easy like Locust)....like what vine maple does when bandsawing a stave in half... and the heartwood is dark unlike the logs in the pic of the abbotsbury wingnut tree removal which look like the same color all the way through... And it is very dense and hard (seems much heavier then .45 SG)

It'll be fun playing with it.... this first one I'll probably leave the sapwood on to see what it does and then try with the sapwood removed on the bigger diameter stuff.

[DarkSoul]

That looks like laburnum (golden chain tree)!  Score!
Although those leaves look odd. Laburnum should probably have already lost its leaves.