There are a few different types of Maple wood, but this article will focus on the Sugar Maple or Hard Maple and known by other names such as Rock Maple, Sweet Maple, Norway Maple, and Black Maple. The wood is very hard and has been used for furniture, bowling lanes, bowling pins, cabinetry, gym floors, cutting boards, and regular floors. It is great for cutting boards because of it being hard and not imparting a taste to food. It has been a popular wood from colonial times. Since it is so hard, it is a challenge to work with unless you have very sharp tools. The wood is considered a light colored wood, but the sapwood can have a reddish tinge, and the heartwood can have light tannish heartwood. It has a straight close grain with a fine texture, unlike say oak. It is very hard, but will easily spit if a nail is driven in it. A drilled hole has to be made for any nails or screws. It glues and finishes well.

Unfinished Maple on the left and on the right
shows how polyurethane darkens the wood
Copyright©1997-2002
Woodworker's Website Association
Used with permission of Jim Mattson

The Sugar Maple tree is also the source of maple syrup and grows very well in Vermont and Upstate New York. In the spring when the sap starts flowing from the roots and up the tree, it is time for what is called "sugaring." The early Native Americans from the Northeast would chop the bark and sap wood with an ax to get the sap. Now the trees are tapped with a metal spile that is about 9/16th inch in diameter. It is tapered in a conical fashion and the end of the spile has a curved "spout" where the sap can drip from, and into a bucket that hangs off the spile. The holes for the spiles are drilled slightly at an upward angle so that the sap flows down. When the sap really gets to flowing, a gallon bucket attached to a single spile can be emptied a few times a day. The newer technique for the industry is to use tubing to connect to the spiles, and then have the tubing sloping down a hill to a collection point. All gravity fed. Regardless of the collection technique, the sap is collected and then "cooked" down. The process is to heat a large tub of sap so that the water is driven, or evaporated off. The amount of maple syrup that can be extracted from the sap depends on many factors, but a good number is about 40 gallons of sap for one gallon of syrup. Pure maple syrup has a very rich flavor and quite different from the store bought "maple" syrup, which may be as a little as 3 percent real maple syrup and is adulterated with corn syrup or other agent.

The syrup can be cooked down further and pure maple candy can be made and it is very sweet, but is great tasting. Cooking a little more and you wind up with maple sugar, a crystallized form. When we use to tap our own trees when tried to keep the product as maple syrup, because to cook it down further for candy, lowered the amount of product quite a bit. We cooked it down outside over a fire after we tried to do it in the house. Lots of moisture is given off (39 gallons for a gallon of syrup) and makes a mess of the house because of the sticky moisture. Usually we tapped the trees sometime in April and the "run" only lasted a week or two. Extracting the sap from the tree doesn't appear to harm the tree, as long as you follow the one-foot rule. One spile for every foot in diameter the tree is.

Since Maple is a very hard wood, woodburning on it requires a higher temperature than the softer woods. It has a nice smooth gain when sanded well.

Below are some woodburnings that Pat Sherman has done on Maple. Click on any image to enlarge. She does a lot of outstanding work on Maple wood, and it is something we all might enjoy trying !

Here are some links to see more pictures of Pat's work ! http://community.webshots.com/user/prs62
http://www.woodohio.com/
http://thecarver.virtualave.net/