Thread: Going hand tools.

Karri also has a reputation as a construction only wood. Presumably because that is what it has been used for most, combined with it's usually straight grained, unfeatured appearance. It also tends to have a pink or orange hue compared to it's more prestigious cousin from WA, Jarrah.

My Karri is nothing like your Karri. That looks like Jarrah to my eye, but the only way you can tell one from the other reliably is by burning a splinter. My experience with Karri is from ex-roofing timbers. Hard as diamond (from baking in the sun) and interlocked. Really, really hard to plane because of the hardness.

Jarrah is also unlikely to split evenly when riving. The figure may look straight, but the grain is interlocked, and the combination can be brittle wood owing to so much short grain. The number of times I have had corners or edges split off ....

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by derekcohen

My Karri is nothing like your Karri. That looks like Jarrah to my eye, but the only way you can tell one from the other reliably is by burning a splinter. My experience with Karri is from ex-roofing timbers. Hard as diamond (from baking in the sun) and interlocked. Really, really hard to plane because of the hardness.

Jarrah is also unlikely to split evenly when riving. The figure may look straight, but the grain is interlocked, and the combination can be brittle wood owing to so much short grain. The number of times I have had corners or edges split off ....

Regards from Perth

Derek

It's dead easy to tell from the endgrain, not pictured unfortunately. FWIW this is the only curly Karri I've seen which is why I had a photo handy on my phone. The piece in the bottom left of the photo is much more characteristic of the Karri we all know and love, or love to hate as the case may be. Cheers, Zac.

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Zac, I must admit that I have never seen fiddleback Karri. That would be a first. Mostly, I find it a coarse wood, sometimes even scaly.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Originally Posted by D.W.

I'd imagine a lot of the wet wood being planed was riven/quartered and maybe softwood. The answer to why you'd do it is two things:
1) it works a lot easier. A LOT easier. Turn something green on a lathe or hand saw wet wood and then dry of the same thing to get an idea. The effect varies a little bit, bu
2) A lot of wet wood doesn't lift as easily ( so you can peel off layers wet and not have it tear out or split as much).
.......

I just do not understand where you are going with this debate, David.

Heavy hardwoods like karri, Tas blue gum, spotted gum, etc, almost universally have tightly interlocked grain. It is virtually impossible to split them irrespective of whether the timber is green or dry.

I agree that when green they are softer and easier to work - both sawing and planing, but why? As they dry, the surface will inevitably check and the boards will twist and cup. Then you will have to flatten and plane the timber all over again.

Why would you want to do this twice?

Originally Posted by derekcohen

Zac, I must admit that I have never seen fiddleback Karri. That would be a first. Mostly, I find it a coarse wood, sometimes even scaly.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Derek - didn't you have a wonderful glue up of karri salvage boards years ago that had some broad figure in it? I don't remember the project, just remember that it looked sort of like oak but better, and recall looking it up to see that its density and hardness was a small step above hickory and a step below live oak (live oak is rarely used here, as you're aware - getting it to dry clear without cracking is a challenge).

Originally Posted by Fergiz01

It's interesting that Karri has come up as a wood that is hard to work with hand tools. At a glance it looks ideal - long straight grains and moderate to high hardness. The problem is is that it so abrasive. Absolutely ruins a freshly sharpened edge in less than a minute. So naturally thickness planing metres of Karri by hand is tough work and means as much time sharpening as planing almost. It can be done as I have done it but it's not what most of us sign up for. Karri also has a reputation as a construction only wood. Presumably because that is what it has been used for most, combined with it's usually straight grained, unfeatured appearance. It also tends to have a pink or orange hue compared to it's more prestigious cousin from WA, Jarrah. Anyway for whatever reason no one uses it to make furniture which I think is a shame. I attach a photo of some curly Karri I'm using which will form the posts for my son's (3) first bed. Also attached is how it looks when I get it.

Ps they are also magnificent trees when alive and standing as anyone who has been to Pemberton can attest.

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i have a trick for you if dirty or silica filled wood is destroying edges -sharpening the bevel side with a buffer. You'll lose just a little bit of life on clean wood, but you'll gain 10x as much on wood with silica in it.

Unicorn Planing.jpg

Same iron, same wood -note the bevel side on the opposite side of this picture is the difference - a 32 degree edge (you can see the battering the silica in cocobolo does - some cocobolo is pleasantly free of silica, but not most) honed flat like "normal" and buffed on the right.

I'm not sure, but I think this is a $3 iron from home depot. On the right side, all that appears is some burnishing from wear. Even the tooth left from less than superfine sharpening isn't damaged by the silica.

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

I just do not understand where you are going with this debate, David.

Heavy hardwoods like karri, Tas blue gum, spotted gum, etc, almost universally have tightly interlocked grain. It is virtually impossible to split them irrespective of whether the timber is green or dry.

I agree that when green they are softer and easier to work - both sawing and planing, but why? As they dry, the surface will inevitably check and the boards will twist and cup. Then you will have to flatten and plane the timber all over again.

Why would you want to do this twice?

If something is so interlocked that it can't split at all, then you saw it. If it's so interlocked that it rip saws poorly, then you decrease tooth size.

As far as why wood is worked green, it's just a matter of work. I don't get green wood, but I will turn blanks partially while green as it's much easier and less dusty.

I gather the idea is simple - there was economic gain to work most wood green when labor was a commodity in woodworking. If wood cracks or checks, then you work it as much as you can green but leave some to work later. It's less labor in total.

Everything that takes less effort in a hand tool only rotation becomes a favorite, and that's just laziness on my part. In poverty work or apprentice work in a competitive low profit business 200 years ago, it was probably necessity.

It's typical with all wood worked green to be split or sawn and planed part of the way with some work left later in final sizing due to shrinkage and defect removal (Surface checking, twist, etc). Since most of us aren't involved in the process with the wood before it's delivered dry, some of this is a lost art. I'm guessing with a power planer, it would probably just make a mess and make things rust, too.

Originally Posted by derekcohen

David, it is not simply that woods like Karri (and Jarrah and She-oak and ....) are hard and abrasive. It is that they also have interlocked grain. This makes riving them impossible, or very wasteful. I imagine that these timbers were avoided 100 years ago for furniture because of the cost in re-sawing them, since this was the only way to produce furniture- (high) quality boards in these woods.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Which goes back to my point - if you're going to work entirely by hand, you're probably not going to use woods like that. I've never seen an old piece of hickory furniture here as the trees tend to be stringy, interlocked and knotty. Varying density due to those things leads to cracking.

No clue where the bright sapwood axe handles and such come from as our trees never looked like that and when I worked at aristokraft, our cabinet wood didn't, either. It was dark with more of a "rustic" (not a fan) look.

The only reason I piped up in this thread is that I once said something on another forum about the apparent lack of wood suitable for hand woodworking in australia and was lined out for it. If I were going to work by hand, small work on interlocked wood isn't that big of a deal (things like boxes up to lap desks). Large furniture pieces, interlocked wood tends not to look that great (the interlocking limits details for carving and mouldings if you're going to work by hand and want crisp details).

And the high hardness stuff usually makes overweight furniture compared to what folks are used to here (cherry and mahogany density is more typical - or something like 0.6 SG, and even that is considered overweight if softwoods aren't used for drawers, or if a case is all 4/4 type lumber without efforts for weight reduction.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Derek - didn't you have a wonderful glue up of karri salvage boards years ago that had some broad figure in it? I don't remember the project, just remember that it looked sort of like oak but better, and recall looking it up to see that its density and hardness was a small step above hickory and a step below live oak (live oak is rarely used here, as you're aware - getting it to dry clear without cracking is a challenge).

Perhaps you refer to this kist (blanket box), David ...



It is Fiddleback Marri.

The front panel is three boards. This wood is typically full of pitch holes. I cut around them, and joined enough to create a clearer presentation. This was tricky as the fiddleback needed to be aligned as well as the figure.



This was in 2013 and before the Hammer equipment. I had a joiner and a bandsaw to produce this ...



Then it was worked down with hand planes ...





While it turned out well in the end, I do not wish to build anything in this wood again.

Regards from Perth

Derek

That was it.....halfway around the world, the difference between karri and marri is just one letter. But I see now that it's much different. Reading about it, it sounds like it's difficult to get pitch free clear lumber that runs straight (marri) - most google references show flooring.

I checked to see if I could match hickory to nuts, and the type of hickory that we had on our property is this:
Pignut Hickory | The Wood Database - Lumber Identification (Hardwood)

Their samples are interesting - our wood was always stringy, knotty and had borer problems, but it's the internet, of course they're not going to show the trash wood.

Blunting is what I remember about it - there's two obsessions on the internet:
1) interlocked wood (because of tearout - use the cap iron)
2) janka hardness

dry hickory is yuck. Dry rosewood is a little slower to work (but not slower than dry hickory), but is wonderful - especially if you can plane a quartered face instead of the flatsawn face. Gabon ebony is supposedly much harder than pignut hickory, but still much nicer to work.

Without working the australian woods, I don't know how they compare. Green locust or newly sawn not bad. Dry standing locust for us resulted in sparks with the chainsaw (but we liked it - you can sharpen a chain without too much trouble - especially if the wood splits nicely). Dry locust that's had years to dry? forget it. it'll destroy chisel edges despite being "only" 1700 and not interlocked that I've seen.

Pignut hickory (all hickories) is listed as resistant to tools and prone to tearout. I don't ever remember seeing interlocking like you see on live oak or quartered khaya, but it still tears. we let the trees stand unless they were within reach of the yard and killed by borers.

The blunting effect (really just resistance to cutting) that hickory has that's outsized for its hardness doesn't always yield a reward, either. Hard maple has a relative blunting effect compared to beech, but it turns around and wears worse. What's the reward? it (hard maple) smooth planes cleanly, but the shavings are stringy and can kill a leaf blower vac while the beech shavings will go right through and tear.

Point of this? You'll notice all of this stuff if you start working by hand. I never noticed any of it when I started and really admired maple for its ability to show no pores and take a smooth edge and corner right off of power tools.

In terms of harness, green Marri (6.6 kN) is slightly harder than green Karri (6.1kN) but it's the opposite when dry, (9.0 kN for karri and 7.1 kN for Marri).
The issue with Marri is getting resin free pieces but occasionally you can get whole trees that have little resin but these tend to have fiddle back resin.
The pews in the Catholic Church in Applecross are made out of this stuff.
D27Grain2.jpg

In the same tree there were a couple of large liquid resin clots - see brown patches below.
grain2Marri.jpg

Recently I've been using some of this wood for small project and can't believe how lightweight is is compared to other stuff like spotted gum but it is just s hard to work with by hand.

Originally Posted by D.W.

.......Without working the australian woods, I don't know how they compare. Green locust or newly sawn not bad. Dry standing locust for us resulted in sparks with the chainsaw .....

Well David, I have some experience of North American woods from my 14 or so years in southern Canada, so I can make some limited comparisons. Not sure which locust you are talking about, do you mean black locust (Robinia sp)? or honey locust (Gleditsia sp.)? I suspect from your description of sparks from dry wood that you are referring to black locust, which is the harder and more siliceous of the two. Yep, it's a tool-dulling, hard, recalcitrant wood, but in terms of workability, it would beat some of our really nasty Eucalypts & Acacias hands-down. You could read a newspaper by the sparks if you chainsawed bone-dry Ironbark in the dark!

As you pointed out above, raw numbers don't always tell the full story, some very hard woods will plane quite well or even very well, while others are near impossible (for me, at any rate). As an example, Bull oak (Allocasuarina leuhmanii) is often (mistakenly) quoted as being the hardest wood in the world. It isn't, though probably in the top ten, yet it saws, planes & turns remarkably well. I wouldn't say easily, but not all that much worse than rock maple, on average (but you will have to re-sharpen more frequently!). Like all wood, it's variable, & some trees are better left for firewood (it burns hot & clean & it's a dream splitter! ), but usually, it responds well to a sharp blade: A. leuhmanii rift.jpg

As the blade dulls it tends to drag out the centres of the softer medullary rays a little, so that piece needs a final polish with a very sharp blade & it would be ready to finish. It takes a lovely lustrous finish, too, so it's well worth the effort it takes to bludgeon it into shape. 2 Bull oak a.jpg

My other point is that while I agree that wood was often worked at a much higher MC when human muscles were the main source of power, some of our Eucalypts in particular, don't give you a very good return for effort when worked "green". The amount of tear-out you get from the rowed & highly irregular grain patterns is often much worse than when its dry. You have to leave so much extra for cleaning up afterwards that nothing is gained. It's way less effort to re-saw (as you've suggested) & clean up the saw-cut, particularly if the saw cut is relatively clean.

I'm fortunate to live in a part of the country where there are quite a few excellent cabinet timbers that are delightful to work with hand tools, and these are what I generally turn to for anything considered as fine woodworking. I would consider Walnut the best-working wood I struck in Canada, and there are quit a few woods from our east-coast forests that are its equal or even better. But when it comes to benches & utility items where a french-polished finish isn't all that important, you can't beat the hard hardwoods for strength, weight, durability and ready availbility. But if I'm building a bench, hand tools get used sparingly & I don't hesitate for a moment to crank up the tablesaw & other power tools wherever they can contribute!

Cheers,

Can you guys give a thought on what's so bad about working it (despite the lightness?) If it's not the pitch, is it the same comment that hickory gets? (blunting is the term they use, I would call it cut resistance - almost like side toughness, that in hard maple corresponds with huge shaving tensile strength - beech just accepts a chisel cut, but is decent for wear resistance. Maple isn't exactly verawood, but the penetration of a chisel is poor compared to beech, and then the wear is poor compared to beech, too.

The woods that have a "blunting" effect are pretty rotten to work by hand because they just resist the cutter. Even if the cut result is good, the resistance is felt by the human powered method.

Sitka spruce is another example here - I cut a nice guitar body out of a quartered piece. Looks great. The guitar forum people said "you can't work it by hand and build a solid body" (that wasn't true, but I get what they're thinking -they mostly use routers and any habits you've built on alder of mahogany will result in little split outs with spruce).

AT any rate, the spruce that I have is less hard than most of my cherry. It seemed to resaw half as fast. The rings in it just don't like sawing perpendicularly. Sawing with the saw between the rings, no problem.

Lots of little things like surprise you when you're working by hand. They equate to "machine sounds funny" if you try to keep the same pace in power tools "must be a little dull" ,etc.