While I was on vacation with my parents, my dad asked me to help him cut down the trunks of two alder trees in western Oregon that the power company had cut the limbs off of. One of them was rotted out in the top. Well, we proceeded to cut them down and cut them into 18" pieces. Some of them were too big to haul to the wood splitter, so we left them lay for a while. While I was gone taking my girlfriend to the airport, he ripped the butt pieces with the chainsaw into small pieces so he could load them up into the cart. When I got around to picking them up this morning, I noticed that every piece was solid quilt. In hindsight, it looks like from the stump that it was a big maple tree, not an alder. There are some pieces that could be sawn into blanks for pistols, but that would be about it. I don't know if it would be hard enough to make gun stocks anyway, as it was probably bigleaf maple which is pretty soft. Is it worth messing with (the tree was probably 18" in diameter).