Thread: Gombeira - good for handles

Originally Posted by D.W.

.... All of these swartzias are probably similar to the gums/acacias there.

I'm guessing of the super hard woods listed that come from down under, there are cases of sometimes available and sometimes not - and of that, I don't mean ability to find the wood at all, but to find it in something you can use without worrying about bad quality wood or a cracking nightmare.....

David, there are something like 700 species of Eucalyptus and a similar number of Acacia species 'here" (which is what I assume you mean by "there"), growing all over the country in every kind of habitat from rainforests to deserts. The properties of the various species and their suitability for specific applications vary enormously, some are quite workable and good cabinet timbers, while others are good only for firewood (& a few won't even burn properly!). With the eucalypts in particular, density is a poor guide to toughness, many are too brittle for anything like a hammer handle or too fissile for a head. The acacias tend to be tough, with a few exceptions, and many make good handles.

There are some extremely hard & tough woods like the dry-country acacias and belah (Casuarina cristata), which should make indestructible mallet heads, but it is exceedingly difficult to dry them in large chunks without serious degrade. Some of the other casuarinas that are a bit easier to dry intact are very hard & dense too, but tend to be highly fissile so don't make very good mallet heads. Most of the several eucalypts that grow around my area have an ADD of about 1 and make reasonably good malletr heads. Such wood is plentiful & cheap, in fact usually cost-free as salvage & scrap, and a mallet takes about 30 minutes to make so mallets are considered "consumables" in my shed.

Because I'm curious about how tough the different woods are, I keep making new ones, so I have a couple of lifetime's supply in reserve.....


Cheers,

As you're probably aware, we don't generally have availability of anything harder or more dense than persimmon locally unless someone plants it. Locust (not a nice wood, and not that dense - just a bundle of wiry springs that crack and check no matter what), hickory, apple, and some others I may be forgetting are around, but oak dominates and it's orders of magnitude away from what we want for handles.

well, dogwood is also a decent mallet wood, but it's a "find someone with one" wood and not commercially available, much like persimmon.

Both of those two are about 0.8-0.85 SG and still far away from the relatively inexpensive mexico/central america woods, and of those, we get what's commercially viable and probably like your mentions, many others that are twisty and dense could be viable, but not in 20-30 foot tall bushes when something like katalox or gombeira grows in big straight runs.

Dogwood and persimmon aren't that pretty, either, and they aren't stiffer than the lighter hickory.

Our "wood database" site here is OK for widely used australian woods but generally devoid of information on most - all I can see is that you have a huge number of woods that are 1.2 or above in specific gravity, and there's too little information to know anything about their workability, and from an economic standpoint, even if they were available, you can't beat the south and central american places that will almost give their wood away. From an ethical standpoint, i don't know the details that much.

Snakewood and Kingwood are the two most interesting to me of their woods, but both are expensive. Snakewood has gotten to the point that it would be about $60 per handle, and I'm white collar, but not $60 per handle white collar. Even gombeira as it's no longer in every corner still makes handles for about $5 per chisel, and would yield four hammer handles for about $10 each.

I figured if it broke, I'd track down hickory in a much better quality cut. I did the latter, but the gombeira didn't break. some of the other central american woods in the 1.1+ SG range don't have the same linear conviction, though, and could be dangerous. 272 pounds of anvil and 4 pounds of head probably could lead to a head bouncing far - pure luck that the first break resulted in holding up the hammer and the handle literally just falling off lazily.

persimmon, you probably know, is literally an ebony. it doesn't look like one and it doesn't feel like one. The family or whatever you call it (Diospyros) is a group of high hardness woods, anyway, without the amount of linear conviction I'd like. Gabon ebony is almost like powder, which makes it great for scraping and profiling, but no good in a wooden plane not wrapped with a metal outside. Learned that the expensive way.

I guess it's horses for courses, I don't use heavy hammers for pounding metal (getting too old & decrepit for that anyway ) so my hammer/mallet handles can probably be of lesser stuff than what you are searching for. A few years ago I got curious about what locally-available woods made the "best" handles & heads for mallets. I ended up making an absurd number - this is just a sample I still have kicking around:
IMG_3776 reserves.jpg

Finding really good head material was far more of a challenge because although being very dense, many of our hardwoods tend to be rather fissile (i.e., split easily, especially along the growth rings). I've smashed up a few heads, mainly through abuse (like bashing out the deck of the mower after running into stumps hidden in long grass )

However, I have managed to break very few mallet handles in my lifetime. There is any number of local woods that make acceptable handles for mallets. Hammers are a bit more demanding - pulling nails out of hard woods puts a lot of strain on a claw-hammer handle! That's probably bleedingly obvious if you think about it., so I'd be a bit fussy about which wood I'd use to re-handle my favourite claw-hammer. We have a few woods that are very good, but probably not quite up to the standard of good hickory.

Anyway, mallets are a minor 'problem' - they are so easy to make I treat mine as 'consumables' and keep a few spares on hand (but most have lasted for 20 years or more). These are my regular users that I keep above the bench: IMG_3780 users.jpg

As you can see, the one on the left gets a lot of use (the marks on the face are from pounding ferrules onto the batch of handles I recently made). It has a head weighing 450g (~16 oz.) and is my 'everyday' mallet for the majority of chisel-driving tasks. The tiddler in the centre is about half that weight & handy for light tapping, while the one on the right is about twice as heavy as the 'everyday' job (~850g) and comes out for heavy mortising. Preferred mallet weight is a very personal thing - I made dozens of mallets over the years before settling on what suits me best.....

Cheers,

We are definitely opposites! I have made some mallets, but usually only when forced to - like a current one that will tolerate a gombeira mortise chisel handle. I thought it was wamara - the head - but realized it's marblewood. Future orders showing up unlabeled will be dealt with by labeling rather than "I'll remember what these woods are later". My handle is olivewood - i doubt it's a good handle material, but it's what I had in a size that I could threadbox. Literally threadboxed and glued the handle and head together and then profiled the handle -fair to say it's a "hurry mallet".

Yes on the handles - I've never broken a handle on a woodworking mallet and doubt I'd even break one made of straight cherry (which isn't a very good handle wood).

I think the stress on a heavier hammer used for blacksmithing, or the stress on the wood up in the head, is just much different, and if the heavy hammer is being used to shape high carbon steel, it's just thud thud thud and not forgiving of iffy wood or questionable taper inside the head of a hammer.

Your lineup of mallets gives the opportunity for "mallet wars" Hit them into each other and see which one is left standing!

I know a little less than nothing about Australian woods but I came into some river red gum awhile ago and decided to use it to make these hammer handles. So far, so good. I do like the way they look.



River red gum handles.jpeg

If the wood came from trees grown in the US, it may well have different properties from the same species growing here - trees grown out of their normal habitat can do odd things. I'd normally consider local RRG to be a bit brittle for hammer handles, particularly nicely figured stuff like you've got there, but the proof is in the pudding, if they are holding up under heavy use, then they're certainly ok, aren't they?

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

If the wood came from trees grown in the US, it may well have different properties from the same species growing here - trees grown out of their normal habitat can do odd things. I'd normally consider local RRG to be a bit brittle for hammer handles, particularly nicely figured stuff like you've got there, but the proof is in the pudding, if they are holding up under heavy use, then they're certainly ok, aren't they?

Cheers,

Ian

Absolutely. It is quite well known that Eucalypts grown abroad can out-perform the same species in Australia in terms of growth, but that probably comes at a price in that the faster growth diminishes the properties. For our American members, Spotted Gum is the primary commercial timber used here for impact handles. On paper Spotted Gum (Corymbia Maculata) is superior to Hickory, but in practice Hickory is the preferred timber primarily, I think, because only select grades are used in Hickory for axe handles, hammer handles etc..

Our American cousins may have access to Spotted Gum as I think it is grown in South America. However, they may not appreciate it's suitability for impact handles.

Regards
Paul