Is Beech A Hardwood Or Softwood

Softwood can work well in some applications decks shops and outbuildings for example.

Is beech a hardwood or softwood.

Its hardness wear resistance strength and excellent bending capabilities coupled with its low price make this hardwood a mainstay for many european woodworkers. This happens to be generally true but there are exceptions such as in the cases of wood from yew trees a softwood that is relatively hard and wood from balsa trees a. Beech is an important and widely used hardwood in europe. Birch is reserved for butcher blocks some tool handles and specialty.

Beech trees can survive in the understory for years. Other soft hardwoods. Hardwood is always much more expensive than the softer woods. Softwood is represented by cedar pine fir redwood spruce.

Combine this with loggers around where we live tending to leave beech and it s easy to develop a stand of almost pure beech. The trees we have are quite large but many are hollow. This wood differs from hardwood by its way of water transportation inside the tree it s structure is simpler than the structure of hardwood. Classifying wood as either a hardwood or softwood comes down to its physical structure and makeup and so it is overly simple to think of hardwoods as being hard and durable compared to soft and workable softwoods.

When the overstory is harvested the beech is released and has a head start over other species. Softwood is the wood produced from trees that have needles or cones instead of leaves. On a hardness scale birch lumber ranks at the top with hard rock maple and in fact is often mistaken for maple. The coloring is also very similar to that of american beech with shades of pink complimenting the creamy color of the wood though a darker golden color arises in veneer.

It generally is less dense than hardwood. European beech hardwood fagus sylvatica this tree grows to around the same heights as american beech though the diameter is more consistently measured to about five feet.