White Ash — Density, Movement, Workability & Cost

Most white ash (Fraxinus americana) sold today is salvage lumber, and there's a specific reason: the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle first found in Michigan in 2002, has killed a large share of the standing ash across its native range since then. Sawn ash is still widely available — mills are working through dead and dying standing timber faster than the borer can spread further — but the long-term supply picture for this species is genuinely uncertain in a way almost no other wood on this list is.

The wood that built the Windsor chair back

At 42 lb/ft³ and 1,320 lbf, white ash is hard enough to resist denting in daily use and light enough to swing all day, which is exactly the combination that made it the standard for tool handles, baseball bats and hockey sticks long before synthetic alternatives existed. Its real signature trait is how well it steam-bends — better than almost any other wood grown on the continent — which is why bent chair backs, especially Windsor-style spindles and bows, lean on ash more than any other domestic species.

Movement, and a ring-porous quirk worth knowing before you cut

A tangential:radial ratio of 1.6 keeps white ash well clear of the 2.0 movement-prone line, better-behaved than red oak (2.1) or hard maple (2.1) and in the same comfortable range as black walnut (1.4). A 16"-wide flatsawn board (roughly a glued-up chair-seat blank) moving from an 11% moisture content down to a dry 6% MC contracts about 0.208" (5.3mm) across its width, computed from ash's own 7.8% tangential shrinkage figure. The ring-porous structure that makes it bend so well also means the large earlywood pores tear rather than cut cleanly if your blade or plane iron is anything less than sharp, so tearout on this species is usually a tool-sharpness problem, not a technique problem. Run your own dimensions on the wood movement calculator. That same 1"-thick, 16"-wide, 3-foot chair-seat blank weighs about 14 lb — check other sizes on the wood weight calculator.

Working, gluing and finishing

Gluing gives no trouble at all — the open pores provide real mechanical key and the wood carries no natural oils to resist an adhesive, unlike teak or ipe. It also nails without splitting far better than an oak of comparable density, which matters more than it sounds like it should on chair and handle work where a split at the very end of a piece can ruin hours of shaping. The open pores that help with gluing raise a decision at the finishing stage: fill them for a smooth, formal surface, or leave them open and let the ring-porous texture show, since a stain-only schedule with no filler tends to look unfinished rather than intentionally rustic.

Cost, durability, and where the EAB situation shows up in pricing

At around $6 per board foot, white ash sits close to red oak in price, though the emerald ash borer situation has pushed some regional prices up as salvage logistics get more complicated over time. It has essentially no rot resistance — sapwood and heartwood alike deteriorate quickly outdoors — so it stays strictly an indoor wood regardless of how the supply situation develops.

Where it's used, and what to reach for

Tool handles, baseball bats, chair parts, kitchen cabinets and steam-bent work generally are the five uses ash shows up in most, and the steam-bending category in particular has few real substitutes among domestic hardwoods — red-oak bends reasonably well too and shares ash's open, ring-porous structure, but ash is generally regarded as the superior bending wood at a similar price and hardness. For a harder, denser tool-handle alternative where impact resistance matters even more than ash provides, shagbark-hickory is the traditional step up, at real cost in workability and weight.

Questions specific to white ash right now

Is emerald ash borer damage visible in the lumber, or does it only affect standing trees? Borer galleries (S-shaped tunnels under the bark) don't typically reach into usable heartwood on a healthy-looking board, but borer-killed trees deteriorate fast once dead, so salvage logs need to be milled promptly — a board bought today is very likely from a tree that died recently rather than one felled specifically for lumber.

Will ash become unaffordable or unavailable entirely? Not in the near term — enough dead and dying standing timber exists to supply mills for years yet, and some regions are seeing ash regeneration from surviving trees — but planning a long-term project around ash as a "cheap, plentiful" wood is riskier now than it was two decades ago.

Why does my ash project feel rougher than the same grit would leave on maple? The open ring-porous structure genuinely does feel coarser to the touch than a diffuse-porous wood like maple at the same sanding grit, even when both are objectively smooth — it's the pore structure itself you're feeling, not a sanding shortfall.

White ash is not CITES- or IUCN-listed as threatened; the emerald ash borer's population impact is a separate, ecological issue from trade-restriction status.