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Nice piece of Maple, is it soft or hard sugar maple?

Nothing to butt heads about- that's a really nice piece of Maple. Yeah, some eschew maple for stocks, others love it. Me- Maple for Guitar necks; Walnut for gunstocks. That still is a very fine piece, and will do you proud!

You're not very good at butting heads WoodHunter.

From one piece to the next, maple is a lot more trouble free and stable of a material to make gun stocks from than walnut ever has, or ever will be!

Now THAT'S, how you start a good fight ! ! ! ! !

Maple stocks have never really tripped my trigger. But, that's a really nice piece of wood and will definitely make somebody very happy.

Yes, maple is a better wood for gun stocks than walnut. And soft maple is never used for gun stocks, meaning silver maple. Only red and sugar (Acer rubrum and sacchrum) are used; and out west, some bigleaf but I am not familiar with that. We mostly use Maple for traditional long rifle stocks and use both sugar and red; red often has more figure (curl) than sugar and sugar is often, but not always, harder. It is easy to tell red from sugar by the grain; hard to explain but easy to see, for me.

Well I have worked in a sawmill for 26 years and Sugar and Rock is hard maple; Red and Silver are soft maple.

You would use hard maple much like good walnut. Soft maple usually has a lot of figure across the board and people use it for gunstocks because of that, but it is not the wood that hard is. In 26 years, I have seen one 1"x6"x12' piece of Birdseye (hard) come out of our mill.

To really get it going, Beech is probably the best gunstock wood, except it is so plain and now getting a bit scarce with the bark disease and all here.

Here is a late Northwest Trade Gun I built in December; it has 100% curl and is Red Maple; yes, it not as hard as Sugar Maple but is widely used for gun stocks; most long rifle stocks are Red Maple as it has better curl, usually. Rock Maple is not a species;; it is another name for Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)
And the hardness of wood can be subjective, depending on where it was grown; for example, walnut, on average, is about the same as red maple, with Sugar Maple being much harder than them both. usually. Yes, beech is a great wood; the Germans fought WW2 with rifles with laminated Beech stocks. I see this picture is washed out but it has full, tight and bright curl.

You see an awful lot of beautifully striped Maple on muzzleloaders these days.

and guitars. My Taylor T3 has a gorgeous quilted Maple body.

There is no shortage of figured maple by any stretch. All of our figured hardwoods get pulled and then are gone over by a very high end woodworker and what he rejects goes out for grade.

I know one logger who is known for identifying figured wood on the living tree!

Also I want to clarify that when I said hard maple is used where you would use good walnut as in desktops, tabletops, etc. It is fraud to sell Red Maple as Hard Maple. That doesn't mean it isn't pretty or useful.

In the muzzle loading stock business, we do not sell red maple as hard maple, or sugar maple. Or soft maple either; we sell, "curly maple". Most of which is Red Maple, Acer Rubrum. How hard or soft it is depends on where and how fast it grew as well as the species.

Yep; good; I got a black walnut blank a couple of weeks ago that must have been grown in a wet bottom here in IA and it is soft as bass wood. Much softer than any maple of any species I have. Fortunately it was free. And I have seen some CA Claro that was pretty soft too.
All my muzzle loading stock blanks come from upper Michigan. I don't know if they have any slopes up there but they have good maple.

When I shop for walnut and maple for my knife handles I look for a number of characteristics since most of them get some amount of relief carving and or silver wire inlaying, sometimes extensively. I have extremely hard thumbnails which I use for my thumbnail test for hardness, and I also look for density and tightness of grain, and of course tightness of figure. Most of my selections come from the scrap piles of gunstock cuttoffs. Great figure for a gunstock has the luxury of being spread out over a wide canvas area whereas a 5 inch knife handle needs denser figure. Of course, the really great figured pieces are best with minimal decoration and stand out all on there own. Woodhunter, if you have firewood that looks like that, I'd be interested in a chord of it, very nice stuff.