Thread: river oak

That's really nice looking stuff! Half your luck.

I presume it's an Australian native.

Thanks for picking that up for me, I'll take it off your hands at the brissy show

Originally Posted by funkychicken

Thanks for picking that up for me, I'll take it off your hands at the brissy show

nah you only want it for the fishing bait thats in it .

and yes it is a native quite common in these parts , (Casuarina Cunninghamiana ) although not normally as big as this one , around here anyway.

Texx - down here on the coast they don't last very long on the ground - for such hard wood, it's amazing how quickly they rot. And if you don't mill a fresh log very quickly, it turns itself into pen-blanks - those big medullary rays are spectacular, but they are also the start points for long, deep cracks! I see your log has a small black heart, which in the logs I've scavenged round here cracks even worse than the outer part of the log, so might be worth keeping that in mind. You can see the dark band on the legs of the table (pic).
It turns quite well & is good for things like chair legs (pic 2). I managed to get 80x80mm bits out of the last log I scrounged, & have just made a couple of 2" bench screws from them, so I'll see how it stands up in that role. Bootle says it was a preferred wood for bullock yokes, but you probably don't need to yoke too many bullocks nowadays...

Cheers,

river she-oak from some research i did a while back is actually a weed. It takes over much of the land occupied by native eucalypts. Mind you, that's not gonna reduce the price of the stuff Nice find

i was down at the river farm yesterday and the bosses son said "you have another oak tree to get " seems the river was in 3/4 flood mode last week and a section of bank fell away and a large river oak fell over , this one is still live not like the other one , i have to go check it out soon , but we will need to do some tractor work to retrieve it i am told .i still have a fair size river red gum that fell over about 3 years ago to to get too when i can , ( need a big chain saw badly)

Originally Posted by texx

........this one is still live not like the other one , i have to go check it out soon , but we will need to do some tractor work to retrieve it i am told

This is the one to go for, Texx - chop it up & get the ends sealed asap. It doesn't take very long for these trees to develop a lot of splits once they croak.

Originally Posted by WoodWad

..........river she-oak from some research i did a while back is actually a weed. It takes over much of the land occupied by native eucalypts.

A "weed" Woodwad? It's the normal dominant tree on water courses in northern Aust. We were once given a definition of 'weed' by a botany prof. as "a plant growing where we don't want it", so I suppose there are situations where C. cunninghamiana could be a weed. Left to its own devices, it never strays far from a creek bed. Are you telling us it's marching south & taking over from the Red gums in the south??
More climate-change horrors?
Cheers,