A few years ago a tornado in the neighborhood hit a barn over 100 years
old and some friends of mine salvaged all the planks and beams that were
made of rough sawn American chestnut [Castanea dentata], now pretty much
extinct as the trees hardly grow big enough to make a board from before
they succumb to the chestnut blight fungus.

What was very distinguishing about these chestnut planks was that even
though it was a light-weight lumber, it had a certain strength to it.
In such a situation where pine or poplar would splinter up under
tornado force, the chestnut beams and planks just came apart at the
joints and remained intact.  When I saw the barn, it merely looked like
a lumber wagon spilled over.

I was given a few planks about 1-1/4 inches thick and 6 feet long.
Being rough sawn and weathered a little bit, I could not make out
the characteristics of it until my supply of poplar and maple was low,
so I decided to mill down a chestnut plank and see if was usable for
stack construction.

I was very surprised to find that it had all of the characteristics of
the wood used in many brands of player stacks -- like Baldwin, Seeburg,
Standard, Kimball and others -- which I have always called poplar.
It was a deep olive green with a tight grain flecked like maple, and
it smelled like the old player stacks when I worked and sanded it.

Another feature of the chestnut is that it mills very nicely.  You
can drill clean channels and bore valve and pouch wells without the
fuzziness and burrs that one gets with poplar.  In short, it has many
of the attributes of hardwoods like cherry and maple but is one-third
less the weight and I imagine it was cheaper at the time and very
plentiful as they were all dying off and had to be cut.  I would
certainly use American chestnut if I could get my hands on some more.

Brian Thornton - Short Mountain Music Works
Woodbury, Tennessee, USA
http://www.shortmountainmusic.com/