Origin
The soft maple is a tree that receives variety of alternative names, such as silver maple, sugar maple or American white maple. Them all are typical species from North America which stretch from the United States East Coast to Canada, thus becoming one of the most common tree genera across this region.
Colour
Soft maple wood has a light reddish brown colour, with small dark spots typical of this species, while the bark is grey and smooth, with more and more of this stains as it become older. For its part, the sapwood is wide and the heartwood has a light differentiated flush.
Texture
The soft maple wood is semi-hard, soft and slightly heavy. Its surface has a uniform and fine-grained texture, with a vein that sometimes has a wavy form. Soft maple wood has a shiny appearance, although the strength of the storms or the excess of water easily damages it.
Durability
The soft maple tree grows along waterways and wetlands where there is so much sun. It grows very fast, so well that many species are rooted to facilitate ornamental use in urban roads and sidewalks, in gardens or parks. That said, we deduce that soft maple wood is therefore a highly resistant material. Its main difference with the hard maple is that soft maple can present insect bites.
Features
Soft maple wood allows easy mechanization for sawing, drying, impregnable, brushing, gluing, nailing and screwing.
Applications
Most common uses and applications of soft maple wood are usually in the field of joinery manufacture to build high quality furniture, although it requires its own processing. On the other hand, soft maple wood is also used to build chipboards, the interior side of the furniture, decorative plates, boxes and handles, moldings, doors and interior cladding at home.