What is it?
A very hard, pale, fine-grained hardwood that takes heavy wear without denting - the standard for sports floors and chopping blocks.
Why does it matter?
Hard maple is priced on whiteness as much as on grade: the pale sapwood is the valuable part, which inverts the usual hardwood rule that heartwood is what you want. That makes handling and drying speed commercially critical, because stain develops fast.
Where it grows
The northeastern United States and eastern Canada.What it is used for
Basketball and bowling floors, butcher blocks, cabinets, furniture, musical instruments, turnery.What to watch
Hard to work and hard on tooling, and prone to burning under blunt cutters. Figured forms - bird's eye, curly - are selected out and sold at many times the price of plain stock.Price
Oak and maple hardwood flooring, US producer price index
Annual averageIndex Jun 1984=100
Basis: US producer price index for oak and maple hardwood flooring - a finished product made from the wood rather than the lumber itself.. Annual averages as published in FRED (US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes) · source ↗. These are reference annual averages, not a live market quote.
What it is used for
All end markets →| End market | What it does there | Importance |
|---|---|---|
| Furniture & Joinery | Sports floors, worktops and cabinets | Defining |