Huh!!...Prze that is fascinating. I can definitely see Birch for the plywood. I use Baltic birch plywood in my furniture pieces and it is still the best.
I can definitely see ash being used for it's structural strength. Sometimes I see pix of British planes with very light coloUred struts and wonder if those were ash. But sometimes they appear to be a much darker coloUr and wonder if this is a different species of wood (mahogany?) or it they were stained. And, if so, why? What would be the point of what seems to have been an aesthetic choice on a war plane? (At that time old growth Cuban Mahogany would still have been available....be still my soul.)
I know (I think) my dad used spruce plywood for the flat sections of the ribs and, I believe, solid spruce for the parts attached to the ribs, when he was building his Fokker Triplane replica. Man, I wish I could ask him!
Neat stuff in both George's execution as well as this discussion!!
Michael
PS (Not to hijack George's thread, but I am really interested in knowing what the two types of wood, light and dark, used were in Bertl's photos of the LVG reconstruction.)