Thread: Bloodwood ??? What to do???

These are the only pics i have at this stage,the single tree is 900mm diam and the other trees next to the ute are 500mm to 700mm.

slab it. or cut wide boards.

it has always been used as large section timber because it has a lot of gum veins causign ti to break into short lengths it cut inot small sections.

it slabs really well and looks fantastic.

go for it mate

Well worth milling

the bloodwood in our area years ago was used for truck trays and floors because it was a strong as ironbark and only half the weight ( so im told )
but a local guy i know who was sawmiller over near bonshaw cut all the skirtings and internal trims for his house from bloodwood , docked out the blood vieny bits and it came up a treat

yes if you are happy to dock out the veins and have short lengths then its a beautifull timber, its alright for furniture if u only need short lengths.

i dont knwo about lighter than ironbark its pretty heavy.

Bloodwood (900kg/cube) lighter than ironbark (1100kg/cube) and bloodwood is a lower strength grade

One side of my shed has bloodwood weatherboards (300lm), if it has no gum vein rings then its as good as anything length wise & its durability class one in ground & very stable with low cross section shrinkage rate, it does shrink in length though, say 2-3mm over a 4.5m board from green to seasoned, if the tree has no signs of sap staining coming from anywhere on the barrel thats a good sign, if when you fall it & butt the log & there are no gum veins visible on the end thats a real good sign that the log will be fairly ok. The sawn timber will eventually just fall apart at any gum vein rings if present. On bloodwoods the sapwood layer is very thick & lyctus susceptable so you need a good diameter to get some recovery. When contract falling I wont look at any under 90 at the butt.
regards inter

Thanks for the info,i was just a bit unsure and did not want to wast time or money but i will give it a go because there are a few more trees to come down now so i will end up with about 15-20 cube of logs to play with,just hope it stays together

Rude if ya need a hand sing out mate

When I lived in central Qld, bloodwood was the timber most people pushed up and burnt. Mainly red bloodwood. It was because of the sap veins, but as everyone has pointed out it is beautiful red timber between the veins. The sawmill in CQ used to occasionally take bloodwood, but only around the 600mm size - they reckon the larger logs had too many veins.

I had about 40 bloodwood logs in the backyard, all cut up now cept for 2 big pieces , some where small but even these I cut up for rack sticks if nothing else, what I found was that size didn't really play a part in how many gum veins and their spacing, I had some small pieces that I didnt bother cutting, and I had some with no veins (not many) some gum rings where spaced 10mm apart some only had one gum ring, I think it's a suck it and see kinda thing.
I cut most of it up into 25mm thick boards 100 and 50 mm wide, and some other bigger stuff, I wouldnt trust it too far for structural unless it was absolutly clean and free of veins, others may have a view on it's possible uses.
It does look good machined up specially when it goes a bit dark with some sun on it and then gets wet,
Peter.

Well gents,
the trees are down but cant be moved at this stage because of the rain.The biggest of the trees had a large pipe and was full of termites ,the other trees had visible gum veins when butted but i am too far in to back out now.I am still thinking of slabbing the larger of the trees but there is also a few around the 30-40cm i'm thinking of cutting into boxed heart, anyone done this with bloodwood? i will post some pics of the progress as soon as i can.
Regards,
Rude.

Rude I did about 15-18 6x6 post for my BIL about 10 months back, he had someone he was building a deck for and obviously they had more money than the neighbors Anyway they wanted 6x6 posts, half where bloodwood and during cutting, only one had rings in it bad enough to chuck it out (so I just ended up cuttin another one - easy) Well scored a nice price for 'em and everyone was happy

ill take that one with teh pipe for split posts if ya dont want it..