Thread: Australian timbers and tool steels

Originally Posted by D.W.

........I think technique will solve more than a change in steel, but so far as difficult woods go, I only generally work cocobolo in any quantity (work as in work from rough to finished), and not for furniture. I don't think anything blunts tools faster than cocobolo. Perhaps other things do as fast. Ebony planes easily for wood of its hardness, but shatters and dulls cutters very fast, too. It is abrasive, but no part of it seems to be particularly connected to any other part........

D.W., I think I've said this before, but the Dalbergias I've encountered, including Cocobolo, African Blackwood and a small amount of Brazilian Rosewood, aren't even remotely in the same category for hardness and sheer cussedness as some of the really tough woods that have been mentioned above. Small sample size may be giving me a false impression, but I wouldn't consider any of the woods you listed as particularly challenging to plane compared with Luke's benchtop.

Originally Posted by D.W.

...... There is one curiosity, and that is that the tasmanian irons that stanley made of M2 showed up in what year? Presumably that was fairly recent. Much much earlier than that, there were high speed steel irons that were branded revlo and sold for infill planes. They didn't catch on, but maybe they would have if planing was popular with beginners. What did aussies do before the tasmanian irons? Was the history of HSS too late into the age of power tools, power sanders, etc, so that it wasn't important, or was furniture made from more agreeable woods instead?.......

Until some time in the 60s, 'hardwoods', had a different meaning in Australia from the way you use it in Nth America. We used it to mean the hard species from the sclerophyl forests & open woodlands (virtually all Eucalyptus & Corymbia spp), and these were used almost exclusively for jobs like house-framing and heavy construction. They were worked green , or partly dry, so sawing & chiselling and even planing, was far easier on man & edges than if it were dried. Furniture was usually made from woods that were much more agreeable to work & referred to generically as 'softwoods', despite few of them actually being cone-bearing species. These came mostly from the east-coast rainforests that originally occurred from a bit south of Sydney to the northern tip of the country. A few Eucalypts have always been used for furniture & joinery, but they are the 'softer' ones like E. regnans & E. delagatensis (the "Ash" group). They are ok to work, but not as sweet as the better rainforest woods, some of which are the equal of anything in the world. So folks got by pretty well with 'traditional' tool steels.

IIRC, the Stanley HSS irons first appeared in the early 70s. Exactly what prompted their issue is probably lost in the mists of time (did Dick mention it in his Titan book??). Before then, I don't remember many people working with our harder woods to make more 'refined' furniture'. West Australia was an exception, they have none of the rainforest species that have found their way into the very north & east, so they had to use what was available, including Jarrah, which I'd put in the 'moderately hard to work with hand tools' category.

Reduced availability of 'traditional' furniture grade woods (& exponential price increases!), the advent of tungsten-tipped cutting tools, & changing fashions has seen a big increase in the use of woods that would once have been considered totally unsuited for fine furniture. Putting a fine or fine-ish finish on this stuff is what all the whining is about. Most sensible people resort to machinery, especially thumping great sanders, to bludgeon a finish onto such woods, but a few stalwarts or just plain stubborn old coots insist on doing it with hand tools as if they were working with fine cabinet timbers.

I agree with you that bevel angles & technique can do quite a bit to help with getting the job done, however, I think you might come around to considering replacing a few of your old Stanley irons with something tougher if we sent you a cubic metre or two of our 'best' tool destroyers....

Cheers,

Premature edge failure on 01 steel can also be traced back to poor technique when forming the hollow grind. Note from the following video the high focus on working the hollow grind from the center of the bevel, and not encroaching too close to the cutting edge. Also note the concerns raised on quenching the steel during hollow grinding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KljbyeueOtE

I've never had O1 steel fail into the hollow. I've also never noticed durability issues with not quenching (but I never use a glazed wheel, either). I can drag whatever I'm sharpening across my palm when I'm done grinding, easily now with CBN, but true before that, too. I wouldn't be surprised if quenching a 200 degree edge was actually worse than gradual cooling, but that's just speculation. I doubt we'd ever notice the difference.

Originally Posted by IanW

D.W., I think I've said this before, but the Dalbergias I've encountered, including Cocobolo, African Blackwood and a small amount of Brazilian Rosewood, aren't even remotely in the same category for hardness and sheer cussedness as some of the really tough woods that have been mentioned above. Small sample size may be giving me a false impression, but I wouldn't consider any of the woods you listed as particularly challenging to plane compared with Luke's benchtop.

Well, I haven't planed african blackwood, but brazilian rosewood and other rosewoods are not in the same league as cocobolo - actually, they're quite nice to plane, very pleasant. Cocobolo's ability to dull an edge depends entirely on how much silica is in it, though. If you can't see any, it probably won't be that bad. If it looks like it's filled with glitter, it will be, and you can't even thickness a plane handle with an A2 iron with stuff like that unless you go very thick on the shaving. Cocobolo hardness is variable, but it's not interlocked. Kingwood hardness is similar to cocobolo, but it is much worse to plane (though it does plane to an extremely bright finish). Both cocobolo and kingwood are too expensive and heavy for me to consider making any furniture with them, though.

I think we must be getting confused with interlocked vs. hard, though. Ebony and cocobolo are both hard, much harder than jarrah, but not interlocked. They dull irons, but aren't unpleasant to plane. Live oak here is about as hard as your hard woods (until you go to the moon with stuff like buloke, but why bother working that?), indeterminate grain and it rewards you in the end by cracking after you think you have what you want - I don't know anyone who works it, but I've gotten old planes made of it and they're always cracked.

You are right about one thing, though. If you can't jack it with a jack plane, I probably won't work it. The same wood is usually a problem to rip by hand, which also cools me on it.

Bevel angles, by the way, aren't where I'd go with planes (not sure if you're assuming that, or just referring to chisels as I did). That just makes work harder. The thing I would do is find a cap iron setting that works with the harder woods - things that seem almost impossible to plane are suddenly much less bad if you can get the shaving to stay continuous. It's like getting a mouldboard plow into dry land - it can be a bear to get it in, but if it stays in, you're OK, even if it's hard pulling. If it isn't adjusted well and continues to come out of the ground, you can't get anything done.

Originally Posted by D.W.

(until you go to the moon with stuff like buloke, but why bother working that?)

Ummm - because it looks spectacular.

Cheers

Doug

Originally Posted by D.W.

........I think we must be getting confused with interlocked vs. hard, though. Ebony and cocobolo are both hard, much harder than jarrah, but not interlocked. They dull irons, but aren't unpleasant to plane........

Um, no, I'm not the least confused when it comes to the particular tree I was talking about, it was both interlocked & hard, very hard!

Originally Posted by D.W.

........Live oak here is about as hard as your hard woods (until you go to the moon with stuff like buloke, but why bother working that?), indeterminate grain and it rewards you in the end by cracking after you think you have what you want - I don't know anyone who works it, but I've gotten old planes made of it and they're always cracked......

You see, this is where we are all getting ourselves tied in knots - we don't have enough common experience to compare the woods we each consider really evil, and our attitudes may be slewed by small sample sizes. I saw plenty of Live Oak (alive & well), in Texas, but never had the opportunity to tackle any wood from it. I have read that it's only good for firewood, & some folks even disputed that!

When it comes to Bull oak, or Buloke (Allocasaurina leuhmanii), I've worked quite a lot of it, from different parts of the country, so I feel like I can make a reasonable judgement. On average, it's far better to work than many other of our famously hard woods, and not all that difficult to plane, except that the monster medullary rays have a tendency to crumble. In fact it's easier to work than Gidgee, which is quite a bit softer, and ring-Gidgee can be nigh on impossible to plane! It also clogs rasps, & you have to work through every darned grade of paper to get a high finish - skip a grade & you'll see the scratches every time. So as someone said much earlier in the thread, Janka hardness per se is not the final arbiter of plany-ness, nor of total 'workability'.

Why would anyone want to work Buloke? Because once dry, it's a very stable wood & can be rather nice stuff for some applications. It can also reward you with a very nice finish, which is quite easy to obtain: halfback bull oak.jpg

I've made one small plane body from it, and it's been fine there, too, but makes the plane a bit heavy for my liking. And before you take me to task, I think the highly polished finish I put on it was a mistake, too. It makes it a bit slippery to hold, but I was doing it as a review of the LV kit for a mag., so I sort of went a bit OTT with it: Kit plane.jpg

Cheers,

Ian; is that a vertical laminated plane stock.

Originally Posted by IanW

Um, no, I'm not the least confused when it comes to the particular tree I was talking about, it was both interlocked & hard, very hard!



You see, this is where we are all getting ourselves tied in knots - we don't have enough common experience to compare the woods we each consider really evil, and our attitudes may be slewed by small sample sizes. I saw plenty of Live Oak (alive & well), in Texas, but never had the opportunity to tackle any wood from it. I have read that it's only good for firewood, & some folks even disputed that!

When it comes to Bull oak, or Buloke (Allocasaurina leuhmanii), I've worked quite a lot of it, from different parts of the country, so I feel like I can make a reasonable judgement. On average, it's far better to work than many other of our famously hard woods, and not all that difficult to plane, except that the monster medullary rays have a tendency to crumble. In fact it's easier to work than Gidgee, which is quite a bit softer, and ring-Gidgee can be nigh on impossible to plane! It also clogs rasps, & you have to work through every darned grade of paper to get a high finish - skip a grade & you'll see the scratches every time. So as someone said much earlier in the thread, Janka hardness per se is not the final arbiter of plany-ness, nor of total 'workability'.

Why would anyone want to work Buloke? Because once dry, it's a very stable wood & can be rather nice stuff for some applications. It can also reward you with a very nice finish, which is quite easy to obtain: halfback bull oak.jpg

I've made one small plane body from it, and it's been fine there, too, but makes the plane a bit heavy for my liking. And before you take me to task, I think the highly polished finish I put on it was a mistake, too. It makes it a bit slippery to hold, but I was doing it as a review of the LV kit for a mag., so I sort of went a bit OTT with it: Kit plane.jpg

Cheers,

What I meant by confused is that interlocked doesn't really abuse edges. Hard does, and full of silica does. Interlocked just makes everything feel like planing into the grain. Glittery cocobolo and ebony will dull something as fast as you'll find anywhere, but they are not that unpleasant to plane (unless you have a reaction to cocobolo). One pass, though, and the next pass will have lines on the board from silica nicks.

I looked up buloke - it has a very high volumetric shrinkage (so does ebony, though), which makes it out for me as a plane wood. Cocobolo has the oily feel that clogs backsaws and rasps, but if you keep a file card or stiff brush nearby and brush the gunk out every few strokes, it's not too bad. And then sometimes another piece that's dark and dry doesn't do that.

I'm probably focusing on different things - one part of this discussion was about whether an iron could stand up to something, and the other is how hard is it to plane. I'm in agreement on interlocked wood or wood with varying runout - you have to work harder to keep the shaving continuous, and that's the territory of the cap iron. Doesn't make it easy to plane, but it does make it a lot easier and the ability to keep a continuous shaving means that a softer iron can be used than what would be needed as a single iron that was unable to avoid tearout.

I made a large cocobolo coffin plane probably two years ago now. It came from a billet that I sized with a stanley, and I had to sharpen once making it. I intentionally took thick shavings to try to maximize the time between sharpening. In the old days, I probably would've sharpened a smoother 20 times (old days being pre cap iron), or defaulted to a HSS plane first and sharpened it 6 times instead of 20 and called it a win. It would've taken forever to do the work with thin shavings, though. While the cocobolo will dull irons as fast as anything, I'm sure I was able to go a little further into the dullness cycle than I would've been able to go if I'd have been planing verawood or kingwood, because the wood is easier to plane.

(re: the plane finish - not great for a sweaty day, but a gloss finish looks good for decades - and great in a magazine shoot. Oil and wax start to get filthy in days. One of the reasons I won't make and sell planes - Larry Williams puts some minwax product on them -and they stay reasonably clean, and I'm not willing to do that. Nor am I willing to field complaints from beginners who don't like that their plane is getting dirty when they use it).

re: the live oak, i'm sure it's not close to as bad as buloke - people built a lot of planes out of it in the old days, and other things. But the fact that it cracks when it dries means that over time, humidity changes will turn it into checked goods. There's a myth here that it's protected and you can't get lumber because of that, but I think the real issue is that people who operate kilns have no interest in trying to tie up a kiln for a long time drying it slowly only to find out that it cracks anyway. That's what we've found about new beech - the one mill here that was drying large beech has given up on it, because it ties up their kiln and there is still a lot of waste. They're now selling european beech, which is a bummer to me for some dumb reasons that have to do with heart and sap - we can get heart in the american beech billets, but not in euros. Sap is traditional, but I like heart better due to the density.

You guys just need to convince our distributors to get some of your wood over here. We can get Jarrah, but whereas it's not that expensive there, it is here. The only thing inexpensive in that hardness range is ipe, but nobody likes ipe. Fire doesn't even like ipe.

Originally Posted by planemaker

.....Ian; is that a vertical laminated plane stock.

'Fraid so, Stewie.

I was asked to review the LV plane kit, which is designed for a laminated body, so there wasn't any option. The review is in AWR #84 (thanks to AWR for having an accessible online index!). It's not something I would've bought for myself, but it's a way for a wannabe planemaker to get their toe in the water...

Cheers,

Originally Posted by D.W.

.......I looked up buloke - it has a very high volumetric shrinkage (so does ebony, though), which makes it out for me as a plane wood......

D.W., sometimes going by a single parameter can be misleading. All of the she-oaks have high shrinkage from green, and need very careful drying to avoid ending up with match sticks, but once dried to a usable MC, they are usually very stable and tough. It takes a long time for water to get out of a dense wood, but it also takes a long time for it to get back in, so you don't get the kind of movement you might get from a less-dense wood with the same shrinkage values. I live in a sub-tropical environment with moisture swings that are pretty extreme, and Bulloak stability is the least of my problems...

Originally Posted by D.W.

.......You guys just need to convince our distributors to get some of your wood over here. We can get Jarrah, but whereas it's not that expensive there, it is here. The only thing inexpensive in that hardness range is ipe, but nobody likes ipe. Fire doesn't even like ipe.

Nah, we want to keep it here - don't want you guys threatening our HNT Gordon......

We've wandered around the topic a bit - Derek's original post was querying if our woods are really harder than elsewhere. I rather doubt that we have the hardest woods in the world, but we may have formed that perception because we are forced to work with species that might be more easily avoided in other countries. Our woodlands are dominated by a small number of genera like Eucalyptus, Corymbia and Acacia, which in general, are bl**dy hard, and vile to plane because of their toughness and extremely wild grain patterns. In other countries, perhaps, you can more easily avoid the truly recalcitrant species.

I think the ensuing discussion has shown that it's dangerous to use any single property of wood, such as hardness, to decide its workability. This is not only because other factors come into play, but because any figures you get tend to be based on limited sample sizes, and worse, they never give us a range. You need the standard deviation for a set of measurements to know how much variation to expect. Some woods will return a narrow range, others a very wide range, for values like hardness, or silica content, etc. So it's no wonder two woodworkers who encounter a few examples of a species could easily form quite opposite views of it (as you & I may have done with Cocobolo )

Cheers,

I've been reading the thread with interest partly to see which direction it was going to go. It is very easy to be lulled into a p*****g contest. "Our woods (perhaps I should say timbers or even lumber) are harder than yours." I have used Keith Bootle's book "Wood in Australia" as my first point of reference for quite a few years. I'm sure that there will be even more information now on the net to add. I have included a single photo from the "Properties" section (I couldn't get the scanner function to work and now I see it has rotated back to landscape as well ). I don't think a single DPS, as an example, will infringe copyright and indeed it may encourage people to buy the book, which I absolutely recommend.

P1000754.jpg

The Janka hardness is measured in kN so DW's 2000/3000 references become 2 & 3 respectively. The hardest wood listed is Lignum Vitae (the aircraft propeller stuff, well hub actually) at 20kN and it is streets ahead of the next nearest. When we talk of how hard these timbers are we are talking a range. The tendency for Australian timbers is to be harder than normal, but we have soft timbers too. Cedar for example,if you can get it (Toona species, not WRC). So many timbers are around the 10kN or higher.

To return to the OP, Derek's contention was that hardness alone may not explain the dulling of sharp edges: It may be that there are other contributory factors. He suggested that many thought silica was an issue although it is not anywhere near as easy as that.

There is another factor and it is the variability of timber. For example, I am a big fan of Spotted Gum, but IanW has only had bad experiences with it. His timber comes from QLD and mine is from NSW. The Forest Red Gum (E, territicornis) from NSW (often called Blue Gum in QLD) is another very variable commodity and behaves very differently to it's near cousin River Red Gum (E. camaldulensis): Chalk and cheese there I'm afraid.

Unfortunately, Bootle's book, excellent though it is, does not delve into other properties such as silica etc.. It does however frequently make reference to increasing the cutting angle for machine tools where the timber is difficult to dress and to avoid pick up. It has detailed descriptions of many timbers (including exotics).

This is an interesting thread, but the question is probably ultimately rhetorical until such time as scientific studies can yield detailed information.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't give free rein to our subjective observations.

Regards
Paul

All good points, Paul. I think we have established a few factors that contribute to 'planability' of wood, so maybe some summing-up is appropriate at this point?

I think we have broad agreement that Janka hardness is not the absolute arbiter of how difficult a wood is to plane, nor how destructive it can be to cutting edges. There are several other important properties, such as mineral content, and type(s) of minerals that have a big influence as well. Wood structure is another factor that almost certainly has a part to play.

But since we don't have any clear method for establishing an objective scale, the only way to compare woods is the good old empirical method, i.e., suck it & see! We definitely have some difficult woods down here, and it's possible (probable?) that the planability of our open-woodland species is worse than average, but I'd place a small bet that Africa or Sth. America could throw up a few doozies to match anything we can put up as the worst of the worst......

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

We've wandered around the topic a bit - Derek's original post was querying if our woods are really harder than elsewhere.

As you've said, Central (and south?) America and Africa can supply some ridiculous woods. The woods Derek uses are, on average, worse (harder, and harder on cutting edges) than what we commonly use in the United States, and worse than the average European or Japanese woods.

It's not that you can't find gross woods here (hickory, black locust, persimmon, mesquite, ), even in the states, we just don't use them much because of the availability of easier-to-work woods. Locust used extensively for fence posts (was - i'm sure there are more economical things now) because it's bug and rot resistant, hickory is used for handles - it's stringy and tough, tougher than its hardness level would suggest - but otherwise we eat the hickory nuts more than we use the wood for anything. It's a very ashy firewood and a pain to split. My father wouldn't put it in the wood stove because it tripled how often he had to let the fire burn down so he could remove the ashes (vs. oak, cherry, walnut and locust) .Persimmon had plenty of use in golf clubs, and mesquite - doesn't grow around here, so I don't know other than small chunks being thrown in grills to flavor meat. I'm sure it gets burned in the southwest.

If you are forced to distill the answer down to only yes or no, I think "yes" would be the answer to Derek's question. Enough so that when he discusses steels and things on forums, you nearly have to caveat his comments for US and European readers who will be working medium hardwoods and softwoods.

When you get away from the forums, I know a lot of local woodworkers around here who use power tools. I haven't met a single one of them who uses anything harder than hard maple for anything other than very small projects. I wouldn't use cocobolo or persimmon if I wasn't making planes. I'd imagine there are local folks in derek's area who use Jarrah and Karri.

Locust has been the worst of the wood mentioned above (to me), even though it's not the hardest. When it dries out and gets more than a couple of years old, it's like case hardened, but all the way through, and it sparks when cut by chainsaws. My mother got wood from the wife of a wood turner who died, and when I traveled to her house to find out what the wood was, it was a bunch of locust logs cut to size to be turned. They were dry. No wonder the guy never turned them. I split them and burned them.

I turn hardwoods for instruments (or try to!) and my favourite Aussie wood is Gidgee. Gidgee is rated at a Janka hardness of 4,270 lbf (18,990N). Ranked the 3rd hardest wood in the world.
Gidgee is hard on tools for sure (about the same as African Blackwood which is ranked 7th hardest) but Jarrah which I turn for rough prototypes and practise is much tougher on my carbon steel Marples chisels. Much more wear. Is this the silica effect?

Vaughan