Thread: Australian Red Cedar (Toona ciliata) - thoughts and ideas

Originally Posted by colibri

Would love to see some projects people have done with Aus Red Cedar and peoples' thoughts of the timber in general!

Here are a few of mine. It's lovely to work, but the dust is horrible. It's prone to getting hairy when planed. A cabinet scraper usually sorts that out.
I'm sorry some of the pics are rotated. I don't have the patience to fight with the forum this morning.

I have just finished some wardrobe sliding doors with the last of a pack of red cedar. It is very variable stuff, some quite heavy some very light. It seems that the further north it grows the lighter in colour and weight. I have had Illawarra red cedar that is dark and rich red. It does plane very well with a sharp blade and I tend to sand it to 240 then coat with dilute shellac as a sealer then sand again to 240 then finish. I'll add a couple of photos (maybe) of the doors and one of some red cedar kayaks that I sold through the forum last year. The best thing about Oz red cedar is the chartoyance(sp?) where it changes colour with the angle of the light so one way it will be dark red and then you move it and the colour ripples through to bright red-gold. I have made some beautiful articulated fish using this quality in old growth southern red cedar. Good luck with it, and enjoy that magic fruity sweet smell.

I've only got one comment. ARC is terrible for chairs. I have antique ARC chairs, C1880. The timber gets brittle with age and they need a lot of repairs.

It is wonderful to use with hand tools

Australian red cedar was sometimes referred to as "red gold" on account of its beauty and workability and potential value. It is still a much favoured timber in antiques. Just visit a few antique shops and galleries and books to see how it has been used. Can be stunning.

It can also go hairy from sanding. Just use a card scraper - also produces a more alive surface. It is very soft and light - dents and scratches very easily when working- be careful, but it adds to the character.

i am not as pessimistic as Mark. There are plenty of antique cedar chairs from the 1850's that have survived 170 years. If that is fragile then I like fragile. Lots of antique furniture needs needs TLC. Mahogany is much harder than cedar, but it may still need conserving.

A jewellery chest i made 12 months ago. If your Cedar has some grain pattern like this it will be priceless


CB45A5CD-435A-4A41-8704-AF0B95E05769.jpegD15E6C91-FC92-417F-BFC7-D4BC3D1C1D90.jpeg1678C112-A1BD-400B-9BDA-96430AD1ECF7.jpeg

We are not jealous, well not much.

Looks to be pretty decent RCD too. Enjoy working with it.

Toona - my kinda wood. I have been involved with cedar from when I started as an apprentice, 65 years ago and continue to this day. I think it would have to be one of the most controversial timbers out there. Much adored by some and disliked by others. The most common beef is its softness. Ah but that can be an advantage, just as much as a disadvantage. Yes, it can bruise easily but is also the easiest timber to remove any trace of a bruise without decreasing the timbers thickness with the use of a wet flannel and a hot iron.
Quality of cedar these days is not what it was at the time of settlement. Most of the old growth material has long since vanished and smaller dia logs are now considered millable. There goes the colour and, in many cases, the density. Soft and spungy doesnt make for good chairs of fine proportion. As a rule, the harder its grown the better the wood.
When cedar is put up for sale it is very much priced according to its merit. One hat does not fit all.

I made this Australian Red Cedar Wellington chest years ago. Its about 1300 mm high. A Wellington chest is an antique set of drawers with a flap partially covering one edge of the drawers that locks with one key. That one key keeps all the drawers locked. This piece also has a full width secret spring loaded drawer up in the frieze section of the top. I made this piece to hold all the scale drawings of furniture I do before making pieces. Something to keep them in some sort of order. It does its job well. I had a real problem before this was made keeping track of things . It has Casuarina cross banding on top. Casuraina turned knobs and an Ebony escutcheon. Its in the style of a 1835 /40 Australian antique piece. Made the same way as a piece of that period would be made with sawn veneer thickness not sliced . All using hot hide glue.

Red Cedar is a lovely timber to use . It takes a bit more effort to polish because of the open grain if a full finish is what you want.

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Rob.

Lovely piece. What's the finish?

Originally Posted by jack620

Lovely piece. What's the finish?

Thanks. Its french polished using shellac.

I have to say I'm not a huge fan of Toona because of it's softness - that does make it easier to saw/plane, but more difficult to chisel crisply & you have to be so damned careful not to drop anything heavier than a feather on it whilst working it. But it does polish up beautifully and it's essential if you want to reproduce just about any piece of furniture made in the late 1800s in this country like this chiffonier/sideboard I made:

Sideboard1 3_04 r.jpg

LOML has this huge cedar COD made somewhere in the first half of the 1900s (which is too small to fit any of my stuff ), so I made a 'matching' tallboy for myself. The wood I used came from a youngish tree that I got as a windfall, so it was a bit pale, even though it comes from the Atherton tableland & comparatively slow-grown. On the basis of some experimental staining I did on some scraps, I decided it would end in tears if I persisted so left it 'natural:

side by side.jpg

It has mellowed a bit over the years but will never match the original exactly. What I should've done was use a linseed-based filler before polishing it. I did that on an old cedar piece I restored years ago (it came in bits & was in a very bad way so I had no qualms in taking it back to bare wood!), and the linseed has darkened the wood a lot over the years since:

Finished.jpg

I was lucky to score some nice, firm, old-growth stuff for our bed & side chests that was much more pleasant to work with:

In place.jpg

But some very old stuff I scored was an absolute swine to work with! It was an old external door that came from the Warwick area, much weathered, with a rotten bottom rail, but all the wood above was intact. It was a beautiful rich colour & felt quite dense. But it tended to form crumbs rather than shavings when planed with the sharpest of irons & crumbles like a honeycomb under a chisel. I made this small chest to house my miniature tools with some and cutting the dovetails was just about the most difficult task I've ever taken on - there are several that aren't quite up to standard!

14 chest.jpg 15 done.jpg

Needless to say, the rest of the door is waiting for some application that won't involve dovetails......


Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

I have to say I'm not a huge fan of Toona

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! ... as the Beetles sang.

You do not like it, and you produce work like that! Please continue disliking stuff.

Graeme, you don't have to like the wood you are obliged to work with, but of course it makes the day go better if you do! In the above cases I was adhering to the style for those bedroom pieces, & the two original pieces being cedar settled the wood question before it was asked...

Nah, if I had my druthers I'd far prefer to work with stuff like Qld maple, which is a magnificent cabinet wood. And a far better mahogany 'substitute' imo is scented rosewood (Dysoxylum fraserianum), it's dense & like 'real' mahogany to work with, finishes magnificently and doesn't dent if someone drops a pencil on it! It has a lovely smell when being worked, too, a bit like Toona, but "spicier": Rosewood occ table.jpg

Its only problem is it's almost as rare as rocking-horse poo nowadays...

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

But it tended to form crumbs rather than shavings when planed with the sharpest of irons & crumbles like a honeycomb under a chisel.

I have some 1880s-ish balloon back chairs (I mentioned them earlier in this thread) that have had extensive repairs done to them by me necessitated by obstreperous teenagers. One chair was pushed backwards and landed hard on the balloon back against a tiled floor. It shattered like glass. It was not a soft push, but not that hard either.

They are really pretty but horrible to sit in. My current project is a dining room chair set. That's going to take a while.