Birch

Also called: silver birch, baltic birch, betula

Birch is a hardwood, pale in the trunk and pinkish-brown to grey in the timber, tough and stringy to work, and better known outside the trade for its bark than for its wood. Holtzapffel (1846) noted that "the bark of the birch-tree is remarkable for being harder and more durable than the wood itself": northern peoples used it for roof tiles, footwear and hats, and in Canada it also served for building boats.

Species and character

American black birch, one of several species used in the trade, was in Hasluck's account (1897) "that most in use for cabinet work," and plain black birch went almost entirely into kitchen chairs and other simple hardwood furniture. Yellow birch (Betula lutea) served mainly for small woodware and yielded tough burrs, knotty, swirl-grained growths on the trunk, prized for mallet heads. English-grown birch was smaller and paler than the imported wood and was mainly shaped on the lathe, spun and cut to form rather than built up, in everyday turnery. European birch (Betula alba) is a tough, stringy wood, pinkish-brown, with a curly, porous grain; it cleans up well when scrubbed, which suits it to kitchen joinery and furniture. Some figured birch, once coloured and varnished, was hard to tell apart from Honduras mahogany. Modern yellow and sweet birch is heavy, hard and strong and resists shock well, and air-dried yellow birch has very high bending strength; even so, birch overall is not an especially durable wood, though that did not stop it seeing wide use in nineteenth-century furniture-making.

Uses in building and manufacture

Yellow and sweet birch lumber goes into furniture, boxes, baskets, crates, cooperage, the making of barrels and casks, interior trim and doors, and in the United States birch is put to broadly the same range of uses as sugar maple. Paper birch is peeled into veneer for plywood and pulped for writing paper, and birch veneer plywood serves doors, furniture, wall panelling, cabinets, aircraft parts and other specialty work. Japanese white birch has also been imported into Britain as a usable substitute timber. In general construction, Douglas fir and birch are the two plywood types most commonly used, and as formwork, the mould into which wet concrete is cast, birch plywood leaves a noticeably smoother surface on the finished concrete than Douglas fir does.

In the workshop

Baltic birch plywood, built up from many thin veneers, is a favourite for shop-built work: one drawer design uses a half-inch sheet screwed rather than glued to the sides so it can be replaced, and a shop table design lays a half-inch top over a three-quarter-inch sub-top of the same material. Offcuts of it have also gone into building the body of a shop-made jig.